House Broken Read Online Free

again. Even Tom’s parents, who were in their late seventies, would not be left out. Duringmonths when birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays were thin, the elderly Novaks invented occasions. Recently they’d hosted a barbecue to celebrate the first anniversary of their new barbecue.
    As much as Tom’s family embraced her, Geneva was an outsider. Her family was too different. Helen had named her four children after European cities to give them the sophistication lacking in their one-horse South Carolina town. But to Geneva their names had come to represent their distance from their mother and one another. She hadn’t seen Paris in ten years, and Florence, two years younger than Paris, rarely left Manhattan. Only Geneva and Dublin phoned and visited each other regularly. If it weren’t for her brother, she might as well have no family of her own.
    â€œYou stay with the kids, Tom. I’ll be fine. Really.”
    â€œShe’ll be glad you came. You’ll see.”
    She smiled at his insistence on remaking her mother into a version of his. Or maybe he believed her mother could change. Geneva knew better. The woman had been on a steady downhill slide since her husband’s death. The trajectory had been hard for Geneva to discern early on. At first she was too young and wholly dependent on her mother to stabilize her fatherless world. A child sees what she wants to see. Once she entered middle school, she began to understand emotions could be complicated—even paradoxical—and attributed her mother’s self-destructive behavior to grief. Geneva, patient and watchful, waited for Helen to come around. But the strength that should have returned to her mother never appeared, or never for very long, and Geneva finally realized she was waiting for a mother she never had. Six years after her father’s death, she left Aliceville (and her mother) for college and for good.
    Helen’s life increasingly took on a haphazard quality, with a recent emphasis on
hazard
. Tom avowed that every incidentprovided an occasion for positive change, but Geneva disagreed. She believed the best predictor of future behavior was past behavior. In her mother’s case, this did not bode well for the future. Her mother was too old and too stubborn a dog to learn new tricks.
    Charlie came into the kitchen. “All done with my homework. Can I watch TV now?”
    Geneva turned to Tom. “I didn’t have a chance to check his grades online today. Has he earned back weeknight TV?”
    â€œHow’d you do on your history test?” Tom asked.
    â€œMr. Shaw hasn’t finished grading them.”
    â€œAnd you’re up to speed on everything else?”
    â€œYup.”
    â€œOkay. One show.”
    â€œThanks, Pop.” Charlie left before Geneva could object.
    â€œI’m willing to wager a week’s worth of dishes there’s a history test in his backpack,” she said.
    He closed the laptop and got up. “You worry too much. I wasn’t much of a student either, and I turned out all right.” He moved to the living room couch and picked up a magazine. Conversation over.
    It wasn’t Charlie’s grades that concerned her, but his character. Habits were hard to break; a child cutting corners and bending the rules was the same as a dog with a habit of digging. Look the other way, and a hole becomes a tunnel, and the dog is somewhere on the far side of the fence.
    Did she worry too much? Maybe. But if she erred on the side of excess concern for either of her children, she had her reasons.
    If you worry too little, you might find out too late.

CHAPTER THREE
    GENEVA
    G eneva held a mechanical pencil above the Saturday
Los Angeles Times
crossword folded in her lap. During the hour she’d sat next to her mother’s hospital bed waiting for her to wake, she had entered only half a dozen words. Her stomach growled. She had rushed from Charlie’s baseball game