If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now Read Online Free PDF

she and Gabriel had first separated, they agreed that their kids’ lives should be disrupted
     as little as possible. So instead of uprooting Nicole and Cameron or making them shuttle back and forth between two homes,
     they took turns living with them in their old house.
    My mother invited Melanie to stay with us on the nights Gabriel was with the kids, and Melanie gratefully moved some clothes
     in and took over my mother’s office. Mom carried her desk and files down to the family room. Mel kept saying that she was
     going to find an apartment, that she shouldn’t impose, but we had the space and her heart wasn’t in the search, which was
     probably just as well. She needed company to distract her from worrying about whether Gabriel had remembered to give Nicole
     her antibiotics or to pack Cameron a sack lunch for his field trip and stuff like that.
    She kept her cell phone on and within reach at all times and dove on it the second it rang.
    If you passed by her room at the kids’ bedtime, you’d see her all curled up around her phone, singing and chanting her way
     through some bedtime ritual with them.
    When she was away from her own kids, she poured a lot of her frustrated maternal impulses into Noah. She’d spend hours baking
     gluten-free cookies for him and searching out books at the library she thought he’d like.
    Noah wasn’t the kind of kid to go around saying “I love you,” but if he had been, I think he’d have said it to Mel way before
     he’d have said it to me or even to my mother, whose relationship with him was always a little distant, a little judgmental.
     “He’s
your
child,” she liked to say whenever a decision had to be made about something to do with Noah.
    I don’t know why she felt the need to remind me of that so often. I certainly never thought of him as anything else.
    Sometimes it struck me as ironic that both Melanie and I had ended up living at home with my parents. It was clear why
I
was once again living in my childhood bedroom. But Melanie had done everything right—gone to a good school, taught at a school
     for kids with special needs, married a guy whom we all adored, and then devoted herself to raising two of the sweetest, most
     lovable kids known to mankind—so why was she, like me, unhappily wandering my parents’ hallways at two in the morning?
    You’d think I’d have felt a touch of satisfaction in our ending up in the same place. I mean, Mel was the family golden girl
     and my whole childhood was spent watching her soak up admiration and love and attention. I should have been delighted to see
     her brought down to my level, right? But that just wasn’t how things were with me and her.
    It probably helped that we didn’t actually grow up together. She mostly lived with her mother and only visited us on the weekends,
     and I was still pretty young when she went off to college. So we never had to fight over rooms or toys or who got the car
     or anything like that. No sibling rivalry because there was no reason for any.
    But it wasn’t just that.
    When I was a little tiny girl and Melanie was a teenager, she’d come over to our house and curl up with me on the bed and
     read book after book after book—whichever one I put in her hand, she’d read to me. If she got bored, she never said so. I
     remember carefully piling up all my picture books the moment I heard her voice downstairs, getting them all ready to present
     to her because she never said “Enough” or “Leave me alone.”
    When I was the teenager and she was in her twenties, she’d let me come stay at her apartment whenever I wanted, which was
     a lot because I often felt like I was going to explode under my mother’s constant scrutiny. On days when the world of cruel
     girls and indifferent boys was too much with me, I’d call Melanie and she’d say, “Come stay with me this weekend,” and then
     all weekend long there would be popcorn and manicures and stupid girly movies and no