Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

noticed that the teacher who spoke was wearing a pair of Taryn Rose sandals. Piper had tried on the same sandal in white at the beginning of the summer and had nixed it as too expensive. The teacher had chosen the red patent. Piper would never have chosen the red patent. The teacher continued, “What’s most important at this stage is getting them to feel at home with books.”
    Listen to this, Piper told herself, reading readiness is important. Reading readiness is crucial . She tried to think of her son’s face, the cornflower blue eyes she found unspeakably beautiful. Whenever Piper read to him, she’d look down to find him watching her. “Look at the book, sweetheart,” she’d prompt him, gently. “What do you think that pig there is thinking?” Or sometimes, “This letter’s an A . I think it looks kind of like a tent. Do you think it looks kind of like a tent?”
    Carter was intelligent, Piper knew that. But his intelligence wasn’t the kind that drew attention to itself. He wasn’t a show-off. Piper believed that Carter knew all his letters by sight, but, honestly, there were moments when he’d regard the alphabet refrigerator magnets so blankly, she couldn’t be positive. When the Tallyrand acceptance letter had arrived, she’d gone into the walk-in pantry and sobbed with relief. Whenever Piper thought about this moment, she would touch a hand to her ribs, remembering how the sobbing had made them ache.
    “Let them know that books are their friends,” the teacher was saying, and Piper repeated the words under her breath.

    Piper didn’t discover the reason for the ophthalmologist’s back’s sudden appearance until the following afternoon. She and Elizabeth were sitting in the big sunroom off Elizabeth’s big dining room, an unusual spot for them. Their usual spot was the kitchen, of course. As with all of Piper’s adult friendships, hers and Elizabeth’s took the form of a long string of conversations in kitchens. On playgrounds and at poolsides, too, but everything real, everything monumental between them had happened in kitchens. And Elizabeth’s kitchen was gorgeous since the remodeling last year. They’d knocked down a wall, gutted the old butler’s pantry, and gone high-end with everything: Sub-Zero, Viking, hardwood cabinets, Italian tile, and magnificent black granite countertops. The custom, built-in wine cooler loomed almost six feet high.
    Piper and Kyle had been privately skeptical of the expense. Supposedly, kitchen improvements paid for themselves at resale, but Piper and Kyle had their doubts. Still, Piper couldn’t argue with the kitchen’s beauty, especially the new windows—nearly the whole back wall was windows—the way the abundance of light deepened the honey color of the floors and set the countertops flashing with secret glints of pearl and blue. At certain times of day, the light appeared to billow into and expand the room, like air filling a balloon. If Piper had been in the habit of taking inventory of such things, she’d have realized that Elizabeth’s kitchen was her favorite place on earth.
    But when she’d arrived at Elizabeth’s house that afternoon, Elizabeth’s “Come on in, Pipe” had come from the sunroom instead, a room that, despite its name, was rather dim and cool due to the enormous (and, in Piper’s opinion, ridiculously, even horrifyingly, overgrown) rhododendrons that bordered the exterior of the room on two sides.
    Elizabeth reclined in a white armchair, her hair—the hair she’d been so grateful to keep—unbrushed and loose on her shoulders, her feet propped on the matching ottoman. The chair and ottoman represented an overstuffed style of furniture that Piper had always disliked, finding it bloated and mushroomy. Elizabeth looked frail in the huge chair, but as soon as Piper noticed this, she reminded herself that a fat, stupid chair like that would make anyone look small. She felt a twitch of annoyance, two twitches, one at