Read Online The Whore's Child by Richard Russo - Free Book Online

there.”
    I’m not thinking of Julie now but of my own parents. If I want your help, I’ll call you in, I remember telling my father during the early days of my own marriage when we had no money and things seemed worse than they really were. Maybe it’s that way with Julie and Russell. Maybe things seem worse than they are. I wish for that to be the case, almost as fervently as I wish I hadn’t been called in. But I have been.
    I start out on foot, explaining to Faye the exercise will do me good, though in truth I just don’t want to sit on top of another motor. Julie and Russell’s house is only a half mile up the road, and up until the operation I’d been running two miles a day—usually in the opposite direction. Seeing their house rise up out of the ground has been an unsettling experience, though for some time it did not occur to me why, even when I saw the frame. Only when the two decks were complete—front and back—did it dawn on me why they’d wanted to use my contractor. My daughter is building my house.
    â€œWell of course they are,” Faye said when I voiced this suspicion. “You should be flattered.”
    â€œI should?” I said, wondering exactly when it was that I’d stopped being the one who saw things first.
    â€œTheft being the sincerest form of flattery. Besides, they’re a mile away. It’s not like people are going to think it’s a subdivision.”
    â€œHalf a mile,” I said. “And what bothers me is that Julie would
want
to build our house.”
    Their mission tile is already visible, but halfway up the hill I have to stop and let the nausea pass. Off to the side of the road there’s a big flat rock that looks like a feather bed, so I go over and stretch out. It takes every bit of willpower I can muster not to unzip and check things out. Instead, I lie still and watch the moving sky. When I finally stand up again, I’m not sure I can make it the rest of the way, though this is the same hill I was running up a few months ago when I was fifty-one. Now I’m fifty-two and scared that maybe I won’t be running up that many more hills. The doctors have told me they got what they were after, but I’m aware of just how little the same assurances meant in my father’s case. After the chemotherapy, they sent him home with a clean bill of health and he was dead in two months.
    Nevertheless, I do make the top of the hill. Up close, the house looks like a parody, but that’s not Julie and Russell’s fault. They simply ran out of money—their own, ours, the bank’s. The grounds aren’t landscaped and the winding drive is unpaved. There are patches of grass and larger patches of dirt. Not wanting to ring the doorbell, I go around back, hoping to catch sight of Julie in the kitchen. I want to talk to her first, before Russell, though I have no idea what I will say. I’m hoping that in the past half hour she will have changed her mind about inviting me into their lives. Maybe I’ll see her at the window and she’ll flash me a sign. I’m willing to interpret almost any gesture as meaning that I should go straight back home.
    Around back, I remember there are no steps up to the deck, which is uniformly three feet off the ground on all sides. I’m looking around for a makeshift ladder when Julie comes out onto the deck, sliding the glass door shut behind her. Except for not knowing how I might join her up there, my plan seems to be working.
    â€œI didn’t think you were coming,” she says.
    â€œHand me one of those deck chairs,” I tell her.
    She does, and I step up onto it. When she offers a hand, I take that too, putting my other one on the rail to heave myself up. Julie is wearing a peasant blouse, and when she leans over I see that she is wearing no brassiere. There have been other times when, against my will, I have been subjected to the sight of my