The Jane Austen Book Club Read Online Free PDF

an apologetic lessening of intensity.
    She offered the sugar to Allegra, who shook her head, frowning and gesturing with her spoon. “Harriet thinks that Knightley likes her. Emma thinks that Elton doesn’t like her. The book is full of people getting that wrong.”
    â€œElton doesn’t like Emma,” Prudie said. “His real interest is money and position.”
    â€œEven so.” Jocelyn returned to her place on the couch. “Even so.”
    We thought how the dog world must be a great relief to a woman like Jocelyn, a woman with everyone’s best interests at heart, a strong matchmaking impulse, and an instinct for tidiness. In the kennel, you just picked the sire and dam who seemed most likely to advance the breed through their progeny. You didn’t have to ask them. You timed their encounter carefully, and leashed them together until the business was done.
    O n the weekend after the aborted tennis match, the weather was so lovely Jocelyn’s mother suggested a picnic. They could go to the park with the puppy, now named Pride and called Pridey, and then he could piss and shit anywhere he liked and no one who had never wanted a dog in the first place would have to clean it up. Ask Sylvia, she suggested, since Sylvia had hardly been over to play with Pridey yet.
    In the end they all went, Pridey, Sylvia, Tony, Daniel, Jocelyn, and Jocelyn’s mother. They sat on the grass on a scratchy plaid car blanket and ate chicken legs fried while wrapped in strips of bacon, and finished the meal by dipping fresh berries in sour cream and brown sugar. The food was good but the company awkward. Every word out of Jocelyn’s mouth was a guilty word. Tony played it bright and brittle. Sylvia and Daniel hardly spoke. And why in the world had her mother come along?
    Pridey was so happy he blurred at the edges. He ran up the seesaw and did not weigh enough to tip it until the very end. The downward plunge frightened him, and he jumped straight into Jocelyn’s arms, but two seconds later, completely recovered, he wiggled his way loose, grabbed a leaf in his teeth, and raced off, dropping it only when he found a dead robin in the grass. Pridey lived in the moment, and a moment with a dead robin in it was a very good moment. Jocelyn had to pick up the bird with a paper napkin and put it in the trash, where it lay on a half-eaten ham sandwich and a moldering apple. She never touched it, but its weight in her hand was so—well, dead—so stiff but rubbery, and the black eyes were filmed over like a window slick with steam. She went to the restroom and washed. On the wall someone had written “Ride the train” in blue ballpoint and drawn a locomotive with the name Erica on it, and then a phone number. Of course, this might be about a train, though Jocelyn knew what Sylvia would say.
    When she got back, Pridey was so happy to see her again he pissed himself. Even this didn’t cheer Jocelyn up. Her mother had lit a cigarette and was breathing smoke out of her nose as if she intended to stay to the bitter end. Sometimes she drove Jocelyn crazy. She wore these slippers at home and some evenings just the sound of them shuffling in the hall was more than Jocelyn could stand.
    â€œI was thinking,” Jocelyn said. “Isn’t it funny that I feel so dirty now, because I picked up a dead bird, but a dead bird is exactly what we all ate for lunch.”
    Her mother tapped the ash loose. “Honestly, dear! Those were drumsticks.”
    â€œAnd delicious,” Tony said. “I like that way of cooking them.”
    He was an idiot, Jocelyn decided. They were all idiots. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked her mother. “Errands to run? A life?”
    She watched her mother’s face fall. She had never thought about that phrase before, but it was exactly right. Everything slid downward.
    Her mother put out her cigarette. “I do, actually.” She