Read Online Re Jane by Patricia Park - Free Book Online

when Grandma Francesca died, she gave it to us. But then Ma had Daddy fix it up, and afterward he said it looked nothing like when he grew up there.”
    And then I started to see: Peppered among the older Italian storefronts, there was an upscale-looking coffee shop. A clothing boutique that looked like it belonged in SoHo. A yoga studio.
    When we reached her school, Devon said, “The final bell rings at two twenty-eight. The parents and nannies usually wait here in the lobby.” She pointed to the smudged map. “If you want my advice, I wouldn’t follow that if I were you. It’ll only make you more confused.”
    When I retraced my way back to 646 Thorn, I pried off my heels and undid the confining top button of my blouse. Beth was probably right—I’d have to get some comfortable clothes. Then I flopped onto the bed. I expected to be met with the same firm resistance of my mattress back home, but this bed absorbed my impact. I opened
The Mazer-Farley Household: A Primer,
and
I was only on chapter two by the time I had to pick up Devon.
    Devon took me on a different route home, through a quiet residential stretch with the occasional pop of a commercial storefront. I passed a candy store, a faded pharmacy. I passed old men sitting in aluminum chairs outside an unmarked building. Then a grocery store that looked like an old Gothic church. A distinctly Korean-looking man was talking into his cell phone, pointing at the store’s roof. I wondered if he knew Sang.
    Devon was brimming with news of her first day back. She was not the only fifth-grader to “take issue with” the summer reading list, and the literature teacher would now compile a supplemental list for the winter break.
    Devon pulled me along by my arm. “This is Gino’s,” she informed me. We were standing in front of a hybrid pizzeria–coffee shop. “It’s where we get our Italian ices after school. My favorite’s rainbow. What’s yours?” She looked up at me with sweet, adoring eyes.
    â€œMine’s rainbow, too,” I said. It was. The last time I’d had an Italian ice was at the place on Roosevelt that served kimchi pizza. But that had been more than ten years ago. I indulged each of us in a treat.
    That night I lay in my new bed listening to the unfamiliar sounds of the house settling. Suddenly I heard a squeak from Beth and Ed’s room next door—a telltale squeak, like the springs of a mattress. I willed the sound to go away, hoping it was just one of them shifting in the bed—but no. It was followed by another, then another.
Please
don’t let them be getting it on. How would I ever look them in the eye the next morning? And then I heard Ed murmur,
“My wife . . . my wife.”
    I placed a pillow over my head, trying to drown out their sounds. Eventually, long into the night, the squeaks ebbed. Reader, one thing seemed certain: Ed Farley was really into his wife.
    * * *
    With each passing day, I tried to learn the rhythms of the Mazer-Farley household. My once hyperactive
nunchi
dulled, grew disoriented. At 646 Thorn it was
do
ask stupid questions.
Do
act like you’re special. Instinct was becoming overridden.
Lose the
nunchi.
Maybe Eunice had it backward; maybe the
nunchi
loses you.
    Slowly I made my way through the primer.
Its opening pages detailed the backstory of Devon’s “alternative birth plan.” She was three when Beth and Ed had adopted her.
“When I think back on that first day in that Beijing hotel lobby, this little girl scared and shivering in my arms, it breaks my heart,”
Beth wrote. The other pages of the section were filled with official documents in both English and Chinese.
    But it was hard to make much headway through the book—it was bloated with information. In some chapters the footnotes took up more than half the page; I had to squint to read the tiny text.
    I took Devon to her daily roster of