Fishing With RayAnne Read Online Free PDF Page B

a melding but independent bits of each, her face a prime example of how they could never quite agree on anything. She has Big Rick’s thick hair and crooked widow’s peak, Bernadette’s nose and the same slight gap between her front teeth. People tell her she’s pretty, but she’s rarely convinced no matter what the mirror shines back. Though her face is better now than it was in her twenties, she thinks, more formed, more her own.
    RayAnne at thirty-four is a late bloomer, as Gran would say.
    Very late.

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    Her shoulder bag thuds to the stack of moving boxes that has doubled as a hallway table since she moved in. It’s been eighteen months, but to completely unpack seems like tempting fate—despite the ratings and Big Rick’s predictions, the show could bomb and she’d just end up going back out on the circuit and having to sell the place. In the past year, two units in her brownstone row were foreclosed on, enough to make her and fellow neighbors twitchy about their investments, so there’s that. No help that her brother Kyle thinks she’s made a grave mistake by buying in this “transitioning” Minneapolis neighborhood, particularly in such an old building. But it’s only a few blocks to the river, and the Realtor had lured her with endless references to character and charm, assuring RayAnne that young professionals and hipsters were snapping up whatever came on the market, that there was even a rumor of a Whole Foods opening two streets over. Truth be told, she was given a mortgage she’d been unqualified for, considering her freelance status.
    Her grandmother had balked at the neighborhood, naturally, having never seen it. So, RayAnne promised Dot she would definitely get a dog, repeating, “Yes, Gran, big enough to ward off a linebacker”—pointedly omitting Dot’s descriptor, “black.” She did make good on her promise to install a security system—the real thing and not just the fake control panels and yard sign. There’s a deadbolt on the basement door and another on the back porch. As an obsessive lock-checker and listener to noises, RayAnne knows every complaint of the old house—the yowl of each radiator, the scuttle of squirrels along gutters, which pipes sing in what key, whether it is an east wind or a west wind huffing down the chimneys. Dot’s worry gene skipped a generation—leapfrogging over Big Rick, who practices all the caution of an oversugared toddler—to land smack on RayAnne’s head. When would she have time to even look for a dog, let alone train one?
    The row house is her very own. She is a homeowner. The thought makes her smile. The day after moving in, when she sat on the bare living room floor and realized that after years of motels and seldom slept-in apartments and two brief and ill-advised cohabitations, she could paint the walls absolutely any color and hang any picture she wanted to, she wept with joy. Even after a year, stepping into the foyer lit by little rainbows from the leaded glass fanlight gives her a thrill. Mine? Really? There are two fireplaces—one in the narrow living room and another in the narrow front bedroom above, so naturally she’d overlooked the scary cellar, the dearth of closets, and the attached wooden sun porch with its skirting half off like Courtney Love. Since she doesn’t cook, RayAnne is unfazed by the Truman-era kitchen with its aqua linoleum countertops and cabinets barely deep enough to hold dinner plates. The floors aren’t really a problem—at least when something spills or rolls she knows which direction to chase it.
    The house has history— real history that dances forth across eras even when she’s performing such mundane actions as hooking her bra: imagining a corset being laced or petticoats being flounced (or whatever one did with a petticoat). Opening the old medicine chest, she wonders what the women of the house used for birth control, and shudders over what being female might have entailed at the turn of the