Three Story House: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

Memphis moves, I fully expect it to be exactly where it is now. But if it’s not—”
    “Then it’s not,” Lizzie said, watching as her cousin’s eyes widened.
    “Hello?” Jim’s voice had a tinny peal to it. “Your mother has more to say.”
    “Think about it carefully,” Isobel said, trying to cover the phone’s speaker. “You could make it the very last thing you do for her.”
    “I can’t do this now,” Lizzie said. She grabbed the phone back and tried to hit the mute button, while Isobel listed off the reasons that she shouldn’t be so hasty about saying no to her parents.
    She wondered if anyone else’s family was as messed up as hers. As a child, there had been long stretches during which her mother and grandmother hadn’t spoken. After Lizzie’s mother married Jim, the silence lasted two years. During that time, she’d taken refuge in her grandmother’s house on Sunday mornings while Jim and her mother went to church. Although only eight at the time, Lizzie had refused to attend, and her parents, bless them, had readily accepted the compromise of allowing her to spend those worship hours with Grandma Mellie. Looking back on it, Lizzie understood that guilt had fueled their acquiescence. There wouldn’t be an oil crisis if the powers that be could figure out how to run the world’s machines on guilt. It was an endless chain reaction motivating action and reaction in families since the first mother had the first daughter. Lizzie figured that was the reason the Bible never got around to naming Eve’s girls. She heard her mother call her name. Lizzie looked down at the phone in her hand, surprised to find that her mother hadn’t hung up. As she moved her thumb to disconnect the call, her mother said, “I don’t think she’s there anymore.”
    “I am,” Lizzie said, and before her mother could take over the conversation again, she said what Isobel had told her. “I’m not going forever. If I do this, then you can’t ask me for anything else. No more guilt trips about Grandma or about not seeing my siblings enough or about church. We’re done with that.”
    “We’re a family—”
    “That doesn’t mean what you think it does,” Lizzie said. “I’ll go, and Isobel will come and we’ll check out the damage and see what needs to be done, but that’s as far as it goes. We’ll probably hire someone and come back to California.”
    “That’s all I was asking for,” her mother said.
    Lizzie kept quiet a long while, listening to the sound of her mother trying to hide the fact that she was crying. “You always ask for too much. This is the end of it. The very last time.”

October 2008: Memphis
    T he November after Lizzie graduated from the University of Central Florida, her grandmother died. She wasn’t alone in this; throughout college, teammates had training schedules and game-day lineups disrupted by the funerals of elderly relatives. Those years were the first wave of grief. Later, when she joined the national team, a few of the women lost parents, and Lizzie saw then that the second wave of loss when it came would be more like a tsunami. But that year, when Lizzie heard her stepfather explain how her grandmother hadn’t woken up, she only felt like she’d walked into water, not been swept away by it.
    The images of her grandmother played on a loop in her brain. She could see her bending low to open the oven in the kitchen of her impossible house. The light streaming from the windows cast her in shadows and made her wrinkles appear as deep crevices. Even when she stood, she remained hunched—a consequence of her fear of doctors and weak bones. She did not let the collapse of her spine change how she approached the world. Compromise, as she’d often told Lizzie, was for fools who valued being popular over being true.
    Lizzie’s last visit had been an afterthought that had the appearance of thoughtfulness. She hadn’t come home specifically to help her grandmother