The House On Willow Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

every day, not the way he had as a small child. But he was an affectionate boy, and now that he towered over her, he’d lean down and give her a hug.
    He called her “Ma.”
    “See ya, Ma,” he’d say cheerily as he was about to leave the house for school.
    He reminded her of his grandfather, her own beloved father. Zach had the same silver-gray eyes with lashes so black it looked as if he wore eyeliner. He had her father’s patrician features too, and his gentleness. For all that he played prop forward on the school rugby team, Zach was a gentle giant. All the girls in Avalon loved him. The ones he’d been to primary school with gazed at him with a combination of fondness and attraction. Tess could see that too: he also had the charisma of his father, the indefinable characteristic that would make women look at him always.
    For the past two months he’d hauled the bins to the gate on Thursday night for the Friday-morning collection, trying to fill Kevin’s shoes. Every time he did it, Tess battled the twin emotions of pride and sadness.
    Huge pride at him behaving like the man of the house, and sadness that it was necessary.

    From the hallway below, Silkie yelped, eager for her next trip out—she knew her daily itinerary as well as Tess did.
    Tess grabbed Zach’s laundry basket and went slowly downstairs. Silkie was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking forlorn.
    “I’ll put the washing on and we’ll go.”
    Tess walked to work every day, come rain or shine. She and Silkie would set out from the house on Rathmore Terrace, through the garden Tess was always planning to spend many hours on but never did, and out the white wooden gate.
    Instantly, Silkie would pull on the extendable lead, sticking her nose into the gatepost in case some passing dog had marked it.
    “Come on,” Tess said most mornings. “No loitering.”
    Every second house was home to one of Silkie’s friends, so there were delighted squeaks at the house of Horace, a Great Dane who lumbered over to greet her and then lumbered back to the porch to rest his giant bones; a bit of roughhousing with Rusty, a shiny black collie who loved games and had to be told not to follow them; a few tender doggy kisses with Bernie and Ben, twin cockapoos who could rip any neighborhood dustbin apart in minutes and caused chaos when they were in their owners’ holiday home.
    By the time she and Tess had come to the end of their street and turned down the hill on to the lane that led to Main, Silkie would be panting with happy dogginess.
    Their next stop was St. Ethelred’s, the oldest Presbyterian church in the country, where tour buses paused for tourists to take pictures of the twelfth-century building, the moss-flecked tombs and small crooked headstones. The graveyard was watched over by three towering oaks that were at least, according to the local tree man, two hundred years old. At this hour of the morning, the great wooden door under the arched porch was locked. The rector would be along at ten to open up, with Mrs. Farquarhar-White following him in to bustle around and polish things.
    On warm, sunny mornings, Tess would take the time to stroll into the grounds with Silkie, drinking in the serenity that inhabited this sacred space. Today, however, a breeze that felt as if it had come straight from Siberia ruffled Tess’s short fair hair as she stood at the church gate, so instead of going in she waited for Silkie to snuffle among the dog roses for any rabbits who’d dared to visit, then the two of them set off down the lane again.
    Cars passed her by, some of the drivers waving or smilinghello, others too caught up in their morning routine to do anything.
    Tess was happiest when the tourist season began to wind down and locals got their town back. With the school holiday over, the caravan parks had mostly emptied out and Avalon was beginning to fall back into the relaxed and gentle routine that would continue through autumn and into