Three Story House: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

temporary apartments depending on the team’s training schedule and on which professional team she was playing for. The last decade had been one of staying in but not living in places.
    Isobel came in the front door, kicked off her shoes, and curled up on the bed next to Lizzie, leaning in to hear the conversation. On the phone, her mother explained how she needed Lizzie to get to Memphis and fix what had gone wrong with the house. She talked about code enforcement and contractors and the small inheritance that her grandmother had left them when she’d died several years earlier. “Bring Isobel with you. Surely she can take a break from acting and put those skills her father taught her to good use.”
    “No,” Lizzie said. “Isobel’s too busy to come with me. I’ve already put her out enough.”
    “That house is as much yours as it is mine.” Her mother took a breath and continued to wheedle, telling her that she understood how she might be angry because of her leg, but that when doors were shut, God had a way of opening new ones and that it was her obligation to walk through this one. “It has to be you.”
    Isobel took the phone from Lizzie’s hand and put it on speaker. “Damn,” she mouthed, as they listened to Lizzie’s mother talk through every possible avenue of guilt.
    It was if her mother knew nothing about her. This disconnect between them hurt Lizzie more than she could admit. Her earliest memories collected, like beads of dew on a spider web, around the sensation of her mother’s hand on the small of her back. It had been the two of them until Lizzie was eight and she got caught up in what she had come to think of as an unprecedented season of expansion. Her stepfather brought with him not only an extensive extended family, but then in a panicked rush against her mother’s biological clock and with the aid of fertility treatments, had turned out two half-brothers, Grant and Lincoln, and two half-sisters, Reagan and Kennedy. She supposed they should have been her new team, but no matter how much she loved them all, they weren’t a team. She was too many years older, and she’d stubbornly held out when they’d all joined that church. Maybe when her siblings were grown, they could be a team, but for the time being there were too many differences. The barrier to camaraderie rarely acknowledged by Lizzie was that she didn’t know who her biological father was or why he’d left, and until she had those answers, she couldn’t commit to the blended family.
    Her mother paused for breath. In the background, Lizzie heard her stepfather ask for the phone. They spoke in muffled tones to each other and after the audible sound of a door closing, her stepfather cleared his throat. “She’s left the room, Lollypop.”
    “I can’t.” Lizzie looked at Isobel, who nodded and moved her hands to try to get her to say everything she thought.
    “I don’t think you should,” he said. “You go there and you’ll be digging up old history and the way things are with your mom now, the way they have been since Mellie’s death.” He stopped talking for several seconds as if he had to stop himself from speaking his mind. “This next year should be all about you moving forward. That house has never done anyone in your family any favors.”
    “It’s not that bad. Grandma was happy there,” Lizzie said, thinking of her rooftop sanctuary with dozens of prisms hanging in its windows. “My rehab is here and I still don’t know where I’ll land. They’re talking about a new league after the Olympics and I should be better by then.”
    “I agree.” Jim started to talk to her about her leg, but then in the middle of asking her about her last flex test, he changed the subject back to the house. “If it goes, you’ll be okay, right? No regrets or anything.”
    “There are always regrets.”
    “I don’t even think they’ll tear it down. We’ll be back in the States this time next year and as slow as