Everything We Ever Wanted Read Online Free

didn’t bother glancing at Charles again. He was obviously ignoring it, and her.
“Not really,” Charles spoke over the noise. “Same ones.”
“And Joanna?” Sylvie turned politely to face her daughter-in-law. “How’s the new house coming along?”
Joanna smiled. “Good. Lots of boxes to unpack still, though.”
“Have you met any of your neighbors?”
She looked down. “Uh, no one yet. But I’m sure we will soon.”
Sylvie nodded. Joanna could tell she was searching for something more specific she could ask her about—a hobby, maybe—but was coming up with nothing. “Excellent,” she finally said. And then, “Goodness. The bread.”
She scampered to the oven, slid on two mitts, and pulled the banana bread pan from the tray. Steam curled around her face, fogging her small, wire-framed glasses. She carried the pan over to the table, removed one of her oven mitts with her teeth, and set it on the table below the bread pan. The knife slid easily against the sides of the pan, and more steam gushed out. She pushed the pan over to Charles who cut himself a thick slice and put it on his plate. He used the side of his fork to cut off a bite.
Joanna waited and waited. Just as he was about to put the bite in his mouth, she touched his arm and said in a voice far whinier than she intended, “Charles?”
He looked up; she nudged her chin toward the pan. He lowered his fork. “Oh. Sorry.”
He began cutting her a piece, but she changed her mind and waved him away. “I’ll be back,” she muttered, standing.
“Joanna,” Charles protested. “I didn’t know you wanted any. You don’t usually eat dessert.”
“It’s fine,” she said loudly, backing out of the room. “I just … the bathroom.” She rounded the corner into the hall.
It was probably silly to feel slighted over banana bread. More than that, Joanna just felt too weird sitting there, looking at vacation houses, chatting about work, ignoring the obvious, especially with Scott fiddling with the stereo one wall away. Nothing seemed to ever get to the Bates-McAllisters, though. Joanna certainly hadn’t been raised like this. If Scott was her brother and her parents were faced with such a scandal—and if her parents were still together—they would confront the problem head-on. Her mother would be a hurricane of panic, making sweeping what-will-the-neighbors-think-of-us statements. Her father would be smacking his fist into an open palm, declaring he’d never wanted to live in such an arrogant, stick-up-your-ass part of Pennsylvania in the first place. He was from the western part of the state, where what one drove and where one shopped and the way one pronounced certain vowels didn’t matter nearly as much. His anger would just incite her mother’s panic—If only you would’ve tried harder to fit in, Craig, this may not have happened, she might say—and that, in turn, would stoke his fury, and they’d circle each other like two worked-up dogs, their bad energies becoming so toxic that a massive fight was inevitable.
Joanna walked down Roderick’s grand hall, which was lined on both sides by heavy, gold-framed oil paintings of foxhunts on scenic vistas, Scottish moors, and generals on horseback. Charles had first brought her here to meet his family two Julys ago, and though she’d been building up the Bates-McAllisters and their estate in her mind long before she and Charles met—though Charles didn’t know anything about that—the house had lived up to every one of her expectations. Sylvie’s meticulously tended garden had been abloom, the tiki lamps by the pool cast soft shadows across the slate patio, and there was a full moon over the roof, so perfectly centered that it was as though Sylvie and James had commissioned it to hang there for them alone.
She’d been blind to the house’s imperfections for a long time. She didn’t notice the wet wood smell. She didn’t see the chips in the leaded glass, the stains on the intricate