A House by the Side of the Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

want the place, it’s yours. Of course. But there are people who’d buy it, people who want the land. You could sell the place and buy something in Chicago. You don’t have to move here to benefit from this inheritance.”
    Meg’s decision seemed not to fit with this lawyer’s plan. “Yeah, well, I can sell it next month if I hate it,” she said. “And I’ll know better what price to ask.” That was as pointed as she felt justified in being without having even met the man, but she wondered if he was one of the people who’d be willing to buy.
    She thought for a few days that she was undoubtedly insane and then decided she didn’t care. She concentrated on the positives. She could plant flowers, get a dog, hear crickets. She could take her cartons and cartons and cartons of books out of storage and have room for them. She could live someplace she wouldn’t have to leave until she wanted to, if she wanted to. She could never run into Jim again. All because of a great-aunt she had barely known, a woman who had paid one visit to her family and sat for hours helping seven-year-old Meg expand her list of names for horses.
    Meg’s mother had dreaded the visit, and there was a pervasive tension in their small apartment as she cleaned and waxed and polished. It had made no sense to Meg. If an aunt was visiting, surely it was an occasion for joy. Recently widowed, Great-Aunt Louise was on her first trip away from Pennsylvania, visiting each of her relations in one extended burst of familial devotion, which, Meg’s mother told her later, was out of character. Still, she had been kind to Meg and endlessly agreeable to the task no one else had time for.
    Together, they had brought Meg’s list to two hundred names. Meg still remembered her feeling of triumph looking at the loose-leaf pages covered with handwriting. Some of her great-aunt’s suggestions were mysterious, but they had the right sound. She could hear the announcer calling them out as the horses pranced, manes tossing, to the gates to start the race. Years later, she found the list in a box of books and games and smiled at “Standard Deviation.” It still seemed a good name.
    After that, there had been Christmas cards. The ones to Meg’s parents contained brief notes, but Meg always received her own, with longer messages and much more interesting news. “The doe I call ‘Lucky’ had twins this year, one much bigger than the other. Oddly, it was the smaller one who was more bold. Mama sometimes had a hard time keeping him hidden.”
    Every year, Meg carefully chose a card to send—the only card she did send. She made sure it had a religious picture rather than Santa Claus and tried to write her own news in the correct Zaner-Bloser style. Aunt Louise had strong feelings about penmanship. In answer to her great-aunt’s request, these cards had always enclosed the most recent school picture.
    That, as far as Meg had ever known, had been the extent of it. The news that she had inherited the bulk of her great-aunt’s estate—her house—had been a shock. Most of the photographs Michael Mulcahy sent he had taken himself. All exterior shots and taken in the wintertime, they had given her only the vaguest idea of what the property was like. The other photographs had been a complete set, carefully organized and framed together, of Meg from third grade through twelfth.
    Now that she was actually at the house, she felt a qualm about the all-important creek. What if it turned out to be just a gash in the land, a deep and sluggish ribbon of wetness or a patchy trickle? She took a deep breath and set off across the meadow. The grass and assorted plants that grew there were turning green, but it was not yet the knee-high expanse it showed every sign of becoming. Before she even got to the woods she heard a sound, a gentle murmur that hurried her steps.
    The path continued to the