The Unfortunates Read Online Free PDF Page A

night. I hope—a lovely time.”
    Later, CeCe stands in her wet dress and her wet shoes, locked between George’s arm and the rail at the top of the metal stairs Javier has for a third time lowered into the sea. As the guests descend and board the launch, she says, “Goodbye! Goodbye, dears, goodbye!”

 
    3
    Two weeks later George and Iris are in bed, staring at the ceiling, not wanting the day to begin. George is to help his mother move to Oak Park. They’ve been preparing for this morning for almost a year.
    “I miss you already,” George says. “I don’t want to be a grown-up.”
    “I know,” Iris answers.
    “Here we go.” He rubs his eyes, pads to the closet. “You want this one?” He holds up a ragged sweatshirt, her favorite on cool mornings. He tosses it to her, opens his top dresser drawer, and tosses her a pair of balled socks. He takes some out for himself, for they share, have worn the same socks, his socks, since the day she moved in with him, at his old apartment in Washington Square. A mystery she hadn’t arrived with socks of her own. She is beautiful by the window, the trees dense below. A surprise to them both, that their new home was in the woods and had no ocean view.
    “You’re inside out.” He tugs the hem of the sweatshirt. She shrugs and shuffles into the bathroom to trade her glasses for contacts, then heads downstairs. He listens to her bang around the kitchen as he packs his overnight bag.
    “Up or down?” she calls.
    “Up. I’m slow.”
    She reappears in the doorway, a cup of coffee in each hand. “Why are you taking so much stuff? All you need is this. And those. Paperwork from the doctor?”
    “Esme.”
    After toast, they walk the path, George’s bag catching in the underbrush.
    “Nice out this early,” she says. “Good air.”
    He inhales the cool smell of morning leaves and nods.
    “Hey,” she says, “maybe it won’t be so bad? No, it probably will. But you’ll do it and it’ll be done.”
    They stand a moment at the edge of CeCe’s property and watch the pale ocean rolling in, buying George a few more minutes.
    “Ready?” she says. They stride onto the lawn and up to the house. Soon, she’s hugging George and CeCe goodbye—CeCe, looking askance at the inside-out sweatshirt, Javier standing beside the gleaming black car, Esme in the front seat, the engine running. Iris waves as the car grows smaller and turns out of her vision. She jogs home. She sits with a second cup of coffee and her laptop and looks at news and shoes and property listings and a YouTube video of a monkey playing tag with a bear and vacation packages and recipes using kelp. Because it’s Monday and she doesn’t have any houses to show, she’ll go for a proper run, go to the grocery and the dry cleaner. She calls the real estate agency and asks them to keep her on client rotation even though she hasn’t got any appointments. She’s lacing up her sneakers when a truck rumbles up the drive. The father and son are back to clean the pool. She greets them in the driveway.
    “Morning. It’s time again,” the father says. “The filters.”
    They climb down from the truck and make their way on the stone path past the house, the son dragging the rubber snake. The air is damp for June, overcast and still. Iris walks alongside in the grass. She offers to get them something to drink. They refuse, drop their gear. They do not like her. Still, she’s glad to see them. To expect the disapproval of strangers is part of her, the bleak places she was raised: the saltbox in Great Village, Nova Scotia, where she loved the wet air and the sea and her stern aunts, her father’s sisters who lived down the street. Camden, New Jersey, where her parents—Richard and Carol, devout and disappointed—were at Camden Bag and Paper. There’d been too much wind in Great Village and not enough in Camden, where Iris turned the public library inside out, the library that smelled like a diaper, even as she