The Precious One Read Online Free PDF Page B

how much effort it had taken Marcus to not say the actual f-word, my mother shot him a black look over her shoulder. But then she began to hum a slow, funereal version of “We Three Kings.” By the time we got to the front door, we were all humming it. It was a nice moment, but when it ended, there we stood, staring at the black door, the brass pineapple door knocker.
    “You bought that door knocker,” I said to my mother.
    “Did I?” She lifted her chin and smiled a smile at me that was meant to be sly but quavered, a smile that made me want to beat the crap out of Wilson. “I don’t remember.”
    Then, like the visitor she was, she grabbed the pineapple and knocked.
    I braced myself for the sight of my father’s face, for the sound of his voice, but I was in no way ready for either, particularly since, during our last face-to-face encounter, he had called me a whore. Even as I stood on that doorstep and thought this, I could hear Wilson’s voice inside my head, correcting me: I never name-call, Eustacia. I was merely reflecting upon your behavior . Which was true enough. His exact words: You have managed to behave in a manner simultaneously whorish and infantile. Quite an accomplishment . When I was eighteen, “whorish” had felt like the adjective equivalent of being pushed down a flight of stairs. At thirty-five, it still felt pretty bad.
    But I stood on his threshold and reminded myself that he wantedus there, now. He had invited us. You don’t invite a person to your house if you don’t miss her, do you? When I think today about that eighteen-year-old, deluded-by-hope girl that I was, I’m torn between wanting to hug her and wanting to slap her silly.
    As it turned out, Caroline was the one to answer the door. Caroline-called-Caro, called Caro by my father , who was generally an outspoken eschewer of nicknames. Caro Bloch, now Caro Cleary, mother of Willow, wife of Wilson.
    I had only met her twice before, and then as now, she struck me as oddly immaterial. Or maybe I mean something more like under-materialized. Caro just seemed less there than most people, as though she were composed chiefly of air and distractedness. In any case, as she stood there in the doorway in her emerald-green dress, with her startled eyes, her painful thinness and thicket of hair, I found her, as I had in the past, impossible to hate.
    No one spoke. Caro just stood gazing at us, and we just gazed back, except for Marcus, who shoved one hand into his coat pocket and stared down the road, wary and faintly squinting, like a guy in a cowboy movie who sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. This all went on for so long that it began to seem possible that we would never go in at all, that we would just stand there, shivering and listening to the sound of the cars going by out on the main road and to the noise of our own breathing until the sky above us went black and the streetlamps flared.
    “So,” I blurted out, “do the Russos still live next door?”
    With my peripheral vision, I saw Marcus drop his head back as though he’d been punched unconscious.
    “What?” said Caro, eyes widening, voice breathless.
    “Joelle and Sam? Their three kids? Or wait, two kids.”
    “Two?” asked Caro.
    “Well, I mean, they still have three. At least, I assume they do. But Abigail got married the summer after we, um, relocated. At least, I assume she—” Marcus kicked my heel with the toe of his sneaker, and I stopped talking.
    Caro gave a start of recognition. I would have said that it was not possible for her to open her eyes any wider than they were already open, but then, lemurlike, she did. “Oh! You mean the woman who brought the pink hat and the casserole after Willow was born!”
    Marcus snorted. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
    I knew my mother would chastise him for being rude later, but the sarcasm seemed to jar Caro out of her vagueness. Her eyes shrank; she smiled.
    “Sorry,” she said. “Between my studio and the baby, I