Fantasy Life Read Online Free PDF

other student mischief.
    Even though football season wouldn’t officially start for another month and a half, Lyssa wanted the safety habits ingrained early. She didn’t want Emily to be anywhere near drunken students and football fans on game weekends.
    In fact, if Lyssa had more money, she would leave town for the two days of festivities around each home game.
    Living here was very different from living in the house she and Reginald had built near Lake Mendota. She had loved that house and she missed it, but she hadn’t fought for it.
    She had hoped that she would inherit it when Reginald moved back in with his family, but once the press crisis was over and the stories quashed, the Walters family let Reginald come home. Lyssa had seen him once, the day the divorce was final. He had looked stable, although she suspected that was his attorney’s doing, but too thin. He claimed to be back on his medication, and he seemed calm enough. But there was something odd about Reginald now, something that hadn’t been obvious before.
    Lyssa, who had never been around mentally ill people before her husband got sick, wasn’t sure if the oddness was a manifestation of his illness or something else. And even though she had never mentioned this to anyone, the something else had frightened her.
    She mounted the old-fashioned stone steps that led to the house’s ugly orange front door. For all of Wright’s talk about wanting his homes to blend into their environment, he had fallen in love with the kinds of 1950s colors that were only partof the environment in the fall, if then. No wonder the alumnus had gifted out the home. If it were Lyssa’s, she would sell it to some Wright fanatic and buy herself some place livable.
    As she stepped inside, she wished for air-conditioning. The interior seemed hotter than the exterior. She’d closed curtains before she’d left and set fans in strategic places throughout the house, but they never seemed to keep the rooms cool.
    She sighed, set her bookbag on the sharp flagstone stairway, and called for Emily. Her daughter was probably outside, where it was a half degree cooler because of the breeze. Lyssa mounted the step, walked past the open living room, and turned left into the kitchen.
    The phone sat on the counter, beside the dirty lunch dishes. She felt a thread of irritation. Sophia always spent her afternoons on the phone. She never did the work that Lyssa had hired her for.
    If only Inez were available all of the time. Inez found ways to entertain Emily and keep the house clean. Sophia just took care of herself and let Emily run amok.
    Fortunately, Emily wasn’t the amok-running type.
    Lyssa opened the refrigerator and reveled in the blast of cool air that hit her. She took out a can of lemonade and rubbed the cold metal against her forehead. A heat headache had started to form there.
    “Sophia?” she called halfheartedly. She would probably find Sophia in the back bedroom, the one that Lyssa had converted into a den, with the television and the computer. The room was small enough that she could keep an eye on Emily when she surfed various Web sites and still pretend to be watching television.
    Lyssa popped the can open and took a long sip. The lemonade was too sweet, but the sugar would help her headache and perk her up just enough to find the strength to make some kind of evening meal.
    She tried not to think of the elaborate grill that she and Reginald had splurged on the summer Emily was born. Lyssa had loved that thing, and she had loved using it on the back patio on hot summer nights.
    She had never understood the rest of the country’s preoccupation with grilling food until she moved east and discovered that most kitchens were too hot to use in the summer, even with the air-conditioning on.
    “Sophia?” Lyssa said as she wandered down the hall. The television wasn’t on, which surprised her. Both Inez and Sophia seemed to love daytime television.
    Lyssa would have objected