All the Way Home by Wendy Corsi Staub Read Free Book Online Page B

thing.”
    “So sleep over at my house. Kevin’s gone, and my mother probably won’t even ask where we’re going.” This is the first time, Molly realizes, that it’ll come in handy to have a mother who’s always so out of it.
    Most of the time, it’s just embarrassing, especially with Rebecca, whose mother is, like, a total Martha Stewart, always baking cookies and doing crafts and gardening, making the Wasners’ house as homey as the Connollys’ is neglected.
    “What about your sister?” Rebecca asks pointedly.
    And for a moment, Molly thinks she’s talking about Carleen. She thinks Rebecca means, Won’t your mother be worried about you after what happened to your sister, even if it was ten years ago?
    But then she realizes that Rebecca isn’t talking about Carleen at all. That the shadow of what happened to her oldest sister doesn’t necessarily loom over everyone else in town the way it’s hung over Molly’s family these past ten years.
    No, Rebecca’s talking about her other sister. About Rory.
    “Oh, please,” Molly says, curling her mouth in disdain. “ She has no say in what I do.”
    “I thought she was here to take care of you.”
    “Take care of me? Her? No way. She has no right to tell me anything. She’s never even been around. I don’t have to listen to anything she says.”
    Rebecca watches her, but says nothing.
    Molly squirms under her friend’s knowing gaze. “Come on,” she says, rising abruptly. “Let’s go to the library.”
    R ory steers Kevin’s car, which he’s loaned her for the summer, out of the Home Depot parking lot onto High Ridge Road, then slams on her brakes, realizing she was just about to go through a red light.
    That light was never here.
    Hell, the vast shopping center was never here . It used to be just acres and acres of fields, dotted with an occasional tree or one of those high tension towers, the kind everyone is saying causes cancer.
    Now there’s a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart—where she’d had at least a dozen different coffeemakers to choose from— and a huge grocery superstore, the kind that sells everything. Everything. Rory found herself buying imported coffee and fresh bagels and firm pink lox and even one of those exotic horned melons. As she glances over her shoulder at the bags of groceries on the seat behind her, she wonders who’s going to eat all this stuff when the house is so empty these days.
    Me , she thinks resolutely. I’ll eat it. And so will Mom. And Molly .
    She had gone into the store because of Molly in the first place, to buy more Cap’n Crunch. With crunchberries. She’d also bought brownies and some of those cookies with the M&Ms from the store’s bakery department, thinking Molly would probably like that kind of stuff.
    Thinking she could win her sister’s stony heart with baked goods.
    You’re a fool, Rory tells herself. Molly’s going to see right through you .
    Oh, well. Rory likes brownies and cookies, herself. She’ll eat them.
    Right after she paints the entire first floor of the house.
    I guess I got a little carried away, she tells herself ruefully, thinking of the cans and cans of white paint she just bought at Home Depot. All she could think was that she had to do something to make the house less run-down, less gloomy.
    White paint will make it sparkle, she thinks as she heads back toward town. Besides, painting will keep me busy .
    And if she’s busy, she won’t be able to brood. About Molly. About Carleen. About Daddy. And about Mom.
    Mom, who, when Rory had gone up to tell her she was going shopping, had been in the middle of an animated conversation.
    With Daddy.
    “No, Patrick, you’re wrong about that,” Rory had heard her say in the split second before she knocked on the master bedroom door. “It wasn’t on the dresser; it was under the bed. See? I told you I dropped it last night.”
    Even after Rory’s knock, Mom had continued talking to her dead husband. Arguing with him, actually.
    And