House of Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page B

direction of my attention didn’t escape my mother’s notice and I felt her sidelong glance.
    â€œYou know, Bobby’s living here now,” she said, as we trailed Rose and Warren.
    â€œWith Linda and Sal?” I asked. It didn’t make sense that Bobby was living in King’s Knoll. Why would he need to?
    â€œHe moved back home so he could finish his residency,” she said. “I guess they have him working all sorts of crazy hours in the emergency room, so he needs someone”—she nodded toward the little girl at his knee—“to help with Gabby.” I had known that Bobby had started medical school a bit later than was typical, having spent a number of years in the corporate world first.
    â€œWhat about his wife?” Several years ago I had heard Bobby had gotten married. I’d been pregnant with Rose and living with an increasingly distant Duncan at the time. I did an online search using the keywords
Robert Vanni Harwick NJ Engaged
. Photos of the wedding came up. His wife was named Mia. Mia Simon. I remembered thinking she looked exactly like the sort of girl with whom I had always imagined Bobby would end up—elegant and exotic and from somewhere other than down the street.
    â€œThey split up,” answered my mother, with the sympathy of someone who had been through an ugly divorce herself. “They have a little girl, but . . .” She shook her head in the way you do when, try as you might, you can’t make sense out ofsomething. “I guess she stayed with Bobby. The mother is out west somewhere.”
    â€œHuh,” was all I could say.
    As the crowd grew denser, I scanned the surrounding homes, their facades like familiar faces on which the years had begun to show. For the most part, they had been well kept. But a bit of passé brickwork or an outmoded feature told the neighborhood’s age, which was of that desolate stretch in the middle: not young enough to be desirable, not old enough to be classic.
    My mother’s house used to be the grandest and was now the most egregiously dated, with its chipped columns and monochromatic red bricks, its yard-sale lawn and crumbling pavement. The grass had been mowed fairly recently, but higher halos remained around the scattered ornaments—the garden flags and toad abodes and reflective orbs.
    The block party, too, seemed to have lost something, with residents ambling out to the street to make their requisite appearances. The party used to be held in the summer, rather than the fall, until it was decided that it was just too damn hot in July to stand in the street all day. Back then we all went outside early with our mothers as they set up, arranging carved watermelon baskets and red and white coolers filled with cans of soda. Everyone would trickle out of their homes and by eleven the street would be a sea of bodies. The mothers would stand in a semicircle, laughing in their sleeveless tops and visors, their legs tanned and strong with the skin only just beginning to loosen around their knees. Occasionally, their eyes would cast about for their children, to make sure that we were present and accounted for. But for the most part we ran free, a pack of us, with burned shoulders and blackened feet. Thefathers’ voices would be louder than usual, boisterous and deep, as they reigned from their lawn-chair thrones, reveling in the suburbs’ fulfilled promise—the pretty wives, the nice neighborhood, the happy kids—all under summer’s hyper-color sun. Then we’d hear Mr. Vanni’s voice.
The Seventh Annual King’s Knoll Sack Race is about to begin!
he’d call, his huge arm waving above his head. And we’d all scramble over the smooth sunbaked asphalt, our lips stained red from the Popsicles that we were downing one after the other, taking advantage of the distracted adults and jubilant chaos that surrounded us.
    Arriving at one of the folding tables,