Desire Lines Read Online Free PDF Page B

night when the news came that Pete had been killed in a car crash. Everything seemed to unravel after that. By the time Jennifer disappeared, the family had already broken apart.
“What do they want for the house?” Kathryn asks her mother now.
“One seventy-five.”
“Isn’t that a lot?”
“Actually, it’s not outrageous for that street. I’ll sell it before the summer’s out.” Her mother stands up and puts her hands on her hips. “I love this job, Kath. I’m damn good at it.”
“It sure sounds like it.” She smiles, amused at her mother’s bravado.
Her mother smiles back. “I’m going to run upstairs and change,” she says. She gives Kathryn a once-over. “You might want to, too.”
TURNING ONTO A wide, well-kept street of enormous old residences set back from the road, Kathryn’s mother slows in front of a white corner house with a turret. The grass is long and the shutters are closed, but flowers in pots along the walkway bloom as if they’ve been recently planted.
“Pete Pelletier put his heart into this place,” Kathryn’s mother says as she pulls into the driveway. “That’s why it’s in such good shape, even after ten years without much care. He rebuilt the foundation and installeda new boiler and fixed the roof.” She puts the car in park and takes the key out of the ignition. “After he died, Linda used the money to put in a new kitchen, but she didn’t do much else. It’s just as well that she’s selling it now, before it falls into serious disrepair.” Opening her door and getting out, she motions for Kathryn to follow.
Kathryn knows all about Will and Jennifer’s father—his tragic, thwarted life and early death. It had been his dream to become an attorney, but when Linda found out she was pregnant the summer after they graduated from Bangor High, and they got married and had twins, it was all he could do to get through college. When he became an insurance agent and started doing pretty well, he brought up law school again, but Linda discouraged him. “You’re making a lot of money now,” she reasoned. “If you go back to school we’ll never see you. Don’t you think you owe it to the kids to be around while they’re growing up?”
So he stopped talking about law school and instead, when he and Linda were twenty-four and the twins were six, bought the dilapidated Victorian on a tree-lined street—a fixer-upper with a lot of potential, the real-estate agent opined as they signed the contract. The house and the family became his project. Evenings and weekends when Kathryn was over he’d be up on the roof, painting the kitchen, wallpapering the hall, fixing screen doors, and adding shelves and closets. He led Will’s Boy Scout troop, took the kids on nature hikes, built a tree house in the backyard. Linda got a closetful of clothes, and they all went to Disneyland on vacation. But there was something about Pete that none of them could reach. He read the paper avidly and was hooked on all the local trials. Sometimes he went down to the courthouse to watch the trial lawyers at work in their sharp blue suits with their snap-front briefcases and eager assistants. Instead of bedtime stories, he told his children about the landmark cases of the century, the Scopes monkey debate, the Rosenberg fiasco, the Nuremberg trials. He knew many of the prosecutorial arguments by heart.
The twins’ mother did as little work around the house as possible. She hadn’t wanted to buy it in the first place; she’d wanted somethingnew. She wasn’t handy, she said, and besides, she had asthma; all that paint and dust filled up her lungs. “Can you hear him in there, banging away?” she’d ask Kathryn, dragging on a cigarette. “That noise is giving me a headache.”
It’s funny, Kathryn thinks now, that Linda didn’t move after Pete was killed, given how she felt about the house. And even stranger that when she remarried, her new husband just moved in. Pete’s death had been ruled an