Read Online The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown - Free Book Online

bridge (competitively), she had dinner at the club with a single glass of wine (socially), and she came home and went to bed. Her skin was luminous, probably due to the truly staggering amount of money she spent on moisturizers and facials and the vague promises of rejuvenating treatments, and though she was almost seventy-five, she didn’t look a day over sixty. Not even a silver hair on her head, though that may have been due to the ministrations of her hairdresser and not entirely to genetics.
    â€œAre you okay?” I asked, bracing myself for some admission of illness.
    She sighed in irritation, turned to the floral arrangement on the front table, and began to fuss with it. “Didn’t I already tell you I was fine?”
    â€œYou did, it’s just . . . what about . . . your garden?” I asked. It wasn’t the most intelligent question, but the idea of my mother moving someplace where she couldn’t have a garden was strange. She had always had a garden. Multiple gardens, in fact: the front garden, the herb garden, the rose garden, the back garden, the ornamental garden, and the side garden.Oh, and the kitchen garden, for the growing of vegetables she never seemed to eat. And there was also what was affectionately known as “the orchard,” which was actually a somewhat confusing collection of two apple trees, a pear tree, a plum tree, and a handful of raspberry bushes that had lost their way.
    â€œThere’s a community garden. Lydia has a plot. And I can have window boxes and planters on the balcony, of course. I mean, I’ll be left off the garden tour, but if it means I don’t have to manage three floors by myself, it will be worth it. I’ve been run off my feet with no housekeeper since Renata left. Honestly. Who gets married during planting season? That girl doesn’t have the sense God gave little green apples.”
    â€œMother!” I said sharply, interrupting what I knew was bound to be a detailed recounting of how much work the house was to keep up and how terribly
busy
she was all the time, interspersed with (and I am not kidding here) exegeses on how hard it was to find good help these days. No normal person would consider the housekeeper’s not planning her wedding around my mother’s gardening schedule a selfish act, but my mother was not normal. She was the star of her own movie. “When are you selling the house?”
    â€œThat’s why Sharon’s here. She’s a real estate agent. Her mother and I are on the Garden Society board.”
    The mind boggled at the idea of Sharon’s having an actual job. We’d had geometry together first period sophomore year and she had regularly stumbled in late, smelling of cigarettes and coffee, asking to borrow a pencil. And now she was going to sell my mother’s house?
    â€œYou can’t sell it now! It’s too soon!” My emotions were already off-kilter, and the idea of her selling the house struck me with dumb terror.
    â€œToo soon for what? If you had to take care of this place all on your own, you wouldn’t be saying that. Why, just last week the wiring in the living room was going absolutely haywire . . .”
    My mother launched into a lengthy complaint about finding anelectrician, and I tuned her out, trying to get my emotions under control. I hadn’t lived in my parents’ house for years. I went back to visit once a year and spent the entire time arguing with my mother and bumping into the enormous antique furniture that always seemed to be lurking around corners, waiting to surprise me. I had never had any particular feelings toward the house, but right then it seemed like the most important place in the whole world, as if it were a monument slated for demolition, to be replaced by a shopping mall.
    â€œMother, you’ve lived in this house for over fifty years! How can you sell it?”
    â€œDon’t yell,