Read Online Are You in the House Alone? by Richard Peck - Free Book Online Page A

into it with my mother. I’d never skipped school in my life, and I thought the first time ought to be the occasion for some fireworks. But when I came in, only her gaze followed me up the stairs.
    It was nearly time for Dad to come home before she cracked my door and actually asked if she could come in. “Want to talk about it?” she said in a neutral voice.
    “I went in to New York to see Dad.”
    “Oh.” She hesitated in the doorway for a moment, digesting that. “I suppose we should have told you before. But your dad didn’t want you to worry. You know how he always thinks you’re still a little girl.”
    “And you don’t?”
    “No. I just wish you were, sometimes.”
    “So do I, sometimes. Maybe that’s why I went.”
    She came all the way into the room then, walking carefully to show we were going to have a conversation, not a confrontation. “It’s very hard for him—your dad.”
    “Yes, I know. I understand.”
    “And that’s why I’m taking this awful real-estate sales course, though I don’t suppose it’ll do much—”
    “Yes, I understand that too. I wish I could say something to Dad. I don’t know what, but—”
    “Oh no, honey. I wouldn’t if I were you. It would just be another burden to him if he thought you knew.”
    “That’s the way we are, isn’t it? All three of us. We keep everything locked up tight inside us because . . . because one little leak might cause an explosion, and we’d all go flying apart.”
    “That’s melodramatic,” Mother said, “and I don’t know what good talking would do. It wouldn’t get Neal—your dad—a job, would it? I, for one, would probably get hysterical. I’m near enough that point anyway.”
    So am I
, I thought, trying to reject the idea that I was so much like my mother. “It’ll just help your dad if he thinks you’re not worrying,” she was saying. “You shouldn’t be having problems at your age.”
    “Didn’t you have problems at my age?”
    It was nearly dark, and she looked young, sitting on my bed with her knees pulled up under her and the crow’s feet around her eyes invisible. Usually I hated it when she came in and flopped down on my bed. But this time we were both making allowances. “Oh, I don’t know what I was like then. It seems so long ago. It
was
so long ago.”
    “Mother, I’m going to go out with Steve tomorrow night,if he’s free. You’ll be at your class, and Dad will be at his board meeting. I don’t feel like staying home alone. I don’t want to.”
    She didn’t hear those last words. “Oh, Gail, not on a school night. You know how your dad feels about—”
    “You’re the one who doesn’t want me going out with Steve, Mother. Let’s not kid ourselves.”
    She’d wrinkled my bedspread up into a little fan of pleats, running the edge of her thumbnail down the folds. “All right, we won’t kid ourselves about that. I almost wish— I do wish we’d never moved up here. I thought it would be—an ideal environment for you. That we wouldn’t have the worry people do, raising a daughter in the city, facing all those problems.”
    “Why does Steve seem like such a problem to you, Mother? He’s not a poor boy from a slum. If anybody’s poor, it’s us.”
    “I hope you know how that sounded. Now maybe you can understand why I don’t want you telling your dad you know he’s out of work.”
    “Is it because Steve’s from an Italian family?”
    “I’m not a bigot. And I’m not—Lydia Lawver.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “You take the pill, don’t you, Gail.” It wasn’t a question.
    “Yes.”
    “How long?”
    “Since last spring. Right after my birthday. I wasn’t sure I could get a prescription if I was under sixteen.”
    “And you got them from Dr. Cathcart! And he didn’t inform me! I think that’s . . . unethical.”
    “No, I didn’t get them from him. But I got them in a perfectly safe, legal way.”
    Mother tried to smooth out the mess she’d made of