The Grownup Read Online Free

Like a beetle. I’d move, that’s how scared I am, I’d move, but we don’t have the money. Anymore. We spent so much on this house, and then almost that much renovating, and…my husband won’t let me anyway. He says Miles is just going through growing pains. And that I’m a nervous, silly woman.”
    “I can help you,” I said.
    “Let me give you the whole tour,” she replied.
    We walked down the long, narrow hall. The house was naturally dark. You moved away from a window and the gloom descended. Susan flipped on lights as we walked.
    “Miles turns them off,” she said. “Then I turn them back on. When I ask him to keep them on, he pretends he has no idea what I’m talking about. Here’s our den,” she said. She opened a door to reveal a cavernous room with a fireplace and wall-to-wall bookshelves.
    “It’s a
library,
” I gasped. They had to own a thousand books, easy. Thick, impressive, smart-people books. How do you keep a thousand books in one room and then call the room a den?
    I stepped inside. I shivered dramatically. “Do you feel this? Do you feel the…heaviness here?”
    “I hate this room.” She nodded.
    “I’ll need to pay extra attention to this room,” I said. I’d park myself in it for an hour at a time and just read, read whatever I wanted.
    We went back into the hall, which was now dark again. Susan sighed and began flipping on lights. I could hear a patter of feet upstairs, running manically up and down the hallway. We passed a closed door to my right. Susan knocked at it—
Jack, it’s me.
A shuffle of a chair being pushed back, a snick of a lock, and then the door was opened by another child, younger than Miles by several years. He looked like his mother. He smiled at Susan like he hadn’t seen her in a year.
    “Hi, Momma,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her. “I missed you.”
    “This is Jack, he’s seven,” she said. She ruffled his hair.
    “Momma has to go do a little work with her friend here,” Susan said, kneeling to his eye level. “Finish your reading and then I’ll make a snack.”
    “Do I lock the door?” Jack asked.
    “Yes, always lock your door, sweetheart.”
    We started walking again as we heard the snick of the lock behind us.
    “Why the lock?”
    “Miles doesn’t like his brother.”
    She must have felt my frown: No teenager likes his kid brother.
    “You should see what Miles did to the babysitter he didn’t like. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have money. Medical bills.” She turned to me sharply. “I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t…major. Possibly an accident. I don’t know anymore, actually. Maybe I am just goddam crazy.”
    Her laugh was raw. She swiped at an eye.
    We walked to the end of the hallway, where another door was locked.
    “I’d show you Miles’s room, but I don’t have a key,” she said simply. “Also, I’m too scared.”
    She forced another laugh. It wasn’t convincing; it didn’t have enough energy to even pose as a laugh. We went up to the next floor, which was a series of rooms, wallpapered and painted, with fine-boned Victorian furniture arranged haphazardly. One room held only a litterbox. “For our cat, Wilkie,” Susan said. “Luckiest cat in the world: his own room for his own crap.”
    “You’ll find a use for the space.”
    “He’s actually a sweet cat,” she said. “Almost twenty years old.”
    I smiled like that was interesting and good.
    “We obviously have more room than we need,” Susan said. “I think we thought, there might be another…maybe adopt, but I wouldn’t bring another child into this house. So instead we live in a very expensive storage facility. My husband does like his antiques.” I could picture him, this uptight, snooty husband. A man who bought antiques but didn’t find them himself. Probably had some classy decorator woman in horn-rims doing the actual work. She probably bought those books for him too. I heard you could do that—buy books by the