The Jane Austen Book Club Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned in the general direction of Daniel and Sylvia. “Thanks for letting me tag along, kids. Daniel, you’ll bring Jocelyn home for me?” She packed up the picnic things and left.
    â€œThat was kind of mean, Jocelyn,” Daniel said. “After she cooked all that food and all.”
    â€œBits of dead bird. Dead bird legs. It just bugged me that she wouldn’t admit it. You know how she is, Sylvia.” Jocelyn turned, but Sylvia wasn’t even meeting her eyes. “She always has to put such a gloss on everything. She still thinks I’m four years old.”
    Pridey had forgiven her for the robin. He chewed through Jocelyn’s shoelace as a gesture of forgiving and forgetting; he was so fast Jocelyn hadn’t noticed it was happening. She had to limp to Daniel’s car in order to keep the shoe on.
    We are not the saints that dogs are, but mothers are expected to come a close second. “That was fun,” was the only thing Jocelyn’s mother ever said to her about the afternoon. “You have such nice friends.”
    Daniel drove her home, Pridey standing on her lap with his little paws barely reaching the window, his breath making asmall, sticky cloud on the back of Jocelyn’s hand. She was sorry now for having been rude to her mother. She loved her mother. She loved her mother’s chicken fried with bacon strips. The guilt she was feeling over Tony was coming to a boil, and the easiest thing in the world would have been to start to cry. The hardest thing would have been to stop.
    â€œThe thing is,” Daniel said, “that I really like Sylvia. I’m sorry, Jocelyn.” The words came from a distance, like something that had been said several days before and was just now sinking in. “She feels terrible about it.” Daniel came to a standstill at an empty intersection. He drove so carefully and responsibly. “She can hardly face you. We both feel terrible about it. We don’t know what to do.”
    The next day at school, Daniel was Sylvia’s boyfriend and Tony was Jocelyn’s. It was much talked of in the halls. Jocelyn had made no objection, because if she went along, it would be the first time in the history of the world that such a rearrangement suited all parties equally, and also because she wasn’t in love with Daniel. Now that she thought about it, Daniel really was perfectly suited to Sylvia. Sylvia needed someone more serious than Tony. Someone who would calm her down on those occasions when she saw that the world was too awful to live in. Someone who wouldn’t spend an afternoon kissing her best friend.
    Besides, Tony had given her Pridey. And kissing Tony hadn’t been too foul. It probably would be worse, though, without the rain and the steam and the guilt. Jocelyn had figured out enough about the way things worked to know that.
    W hat makes me unhappiest about Emma ,” said Allegra, “are the class issues about her friend Harriet. In the end, Emma, the new,improved Emma, the chastened Emma, understands that Harriet wasn’t good enough to marry the odious Elton after all. When there was some hope that her natural father was a gentleman, she would have been, but once it’s established that he was in trade, then Harriet is lucky to get a farmer.”
    It was now late enough that the heaters never cycled off. They hummed and puffed, and those of us seated next to them were too hot, the rest too cold. No coffee remained but the nasty bits at the bottoms of the cups, and the crème de menthe squares were gone—clear signs that the evening was coming to an end. Some of us had headaches.
    â€œThe class stuff in Emma is complicated.” Bernadette was settled back in her chair, her belly mounding under her dress, her feet tucked up like a girl’s. She had taken yoga for years and could put her feet into some astonishing places. “First, there’s the fact of Harriet’s