Read Online Love, Suburban Style by Wendy Markham - Free Book Online

then leave it alone.”
    That wasn’t nearly as easy for Sam to do as it was for Jack to say.
    It was also easy for Jack to say, amid Sam’s many precautions as he was headed to the city with Ben today, “Do you really think I’m going to lose him somewhere? And that even if I did, he wouldn’t find his way back home again?”
    Sam just shook his head.
    Bad things happen in this world.
    Children are kidnaped. Struck by lightning.
    Their mothers walk out the door to go grocery shopping and never come back.
    Sam squeezes his eyes closed in an effort to stave off the vivid memory of the crushed blue station wagon at the intersection. But he can’t shut it out, nor a haunting echo of the wailing sirens that sounded less than five minutes after Sheryl left home that day. When he heard them, he somehow
knew.
    He just knew.
    And he was right.
    The nightmare had begun.
    Widowed, devastated, he moved back into this house with his children—and dog—in tow. His mother had offered to move in with him instead, but he couldn’t stand the thought of staying on in that house they rented in Pelham without Sheryl. Everywhere he looked, there were memories.
    Here, at least, he stood a chance of eventually moving on.
    So he came home to Glenhaven Park.
    He commuted to his old teaching job in lower Westchester until, miraculously, a position opened up right here at his old school. Things had fallen into place within a year of Sheryl’s death—he and the kids were settled in here with his mother, surviving.
    Yes, there are memories in this house, too. Plenty of them. He grew up here, raised with his brother Jack under this very roof. Ben has his boyhood room now, and Katie has Jack’s. Sam has his parents’.
    Mom passed away two years ago. It was unexpected, though not the tragedy losing Sheryl had been.
    In fact, at first, Sam reacted so numbly to the loss of his mother that Jack was worried about him. Gradually, the pain seeped in. But with it came an odd sense of peace. He bought out Jack’s half of their inherited property, and this felt like home once again, in a way it didn’t while he was living here with his mother.
    Hearing another roll of thunder, Sam rises abruptly from his chair.
    There goes the ball game,
he thinks. The Yankees should be throwing out the starting pitch right around the time the pizza arrives. He was planning to watch the game, but the cable frequently goes out in thunderstorms. Plus, the Yanks are playing at home in the Bronx only thirty-some miles south of here—the game will be affected by the rain anyway.
    It’s going to be a long, dull, lonely night.
    So what else is new?
    Sam steps over Rover, plunks his open novel facedown on the coffee table, and bends over the back of the couch to peek out the front picture window.
    The first thing he sees is the Trailblazer, parked on the driveway.
    Yup, windows down.
    And…
    Huh. There’s a big U-Haul truck parked at the curb in front of the Duckworth house next door.
    Here we go again.
    This time, the house wasn’t even on the market all that long. A FOR SALE sign hadn’t yet been planted in the lawn before he heard the place had been sold again.
    He has no idea who bought it this time, nor does he care.
    Why should he?
    It won’t be long before his new neighbors get wind of the rumors, fall victim to their imaginations, and go the way of the Delgados, and the Sterns before them, and the Blumbergs before them.
    Seeing movement behind the truck, he spots a petite figure staggering backward, only half-visible beneath a towering cardboard box.
    So the new people have children—and they’ve put them to work.
    Well, that’s good. Most of the kids around Glenhaven Park these days are the spoiled offspring of privileged parents.
    Sam is thinking that it will be nice for Katie and Ben to have kids next door after all… until it occurs to him that it won’t be nice at all when they move.
    Maybe I won’t even tell the kids about the new neighbors,
he