Falling by Jane Green Read Free Book Online Page B

somewhere!
    â€œAnd I have cookies and fruit for the kids. Hi, Jesse!” Lynn says, as she leans down and gives Jesse a high five. “Weldon’s in the playroom, sweetie. You want a juice box or some cookies before you go?”
    Jesse shakes his head before running up the stairs to the room above the garage that was once a bonus room but has now been repurposed into a playroom, complete with basketball hoop for a passion Weldon’s dad very much hopes he will soon develop.
    Dominic sits down at the stool at the counter, looking around.“This house is beautiful,” he says to Lynn, getting up quickly to examine the open shelving on one side of the kitchen. “I love these shelves.”
    â€œThey aren’t new!” Lynn says.
    â€œI know, but I never noticed them. I just built shelves for a new tenant so I’m noticing shelves in a way I hadn’t before.”
    â€œI didn’t know you were handy.”
    â€œThere are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” says Dominic.
    â€œReally?” Lynn raises an eyebrow. “Want to tell me more?”
    Dominic blushes. He had no intention of flirting with Lynn, the mother of Jesse’s best friend since preschool. He knows Weldon’s dad, even though he doesn’t see him much, since Tom commutes into the city every day. Tom is more of a weekend dad, the kind who throws himself into coaching Little League and driving his kids everywhere on the weekend, because during the week he’s lucky if he even gets to see them.
    Dominic has lived in this town his entire life. He grew up going to school with the kids of policemen, garbage collectors, actors, and writers. He grew up in a time when everyone knew everyone else, when there were few class distinctions, when nobody cared how much money anyone had, or how big your house was. Very few families even lived in big houses back then. Now the McMansions in town have reached absurd proportions, much like the one he is sitting in now.
    Dominic remembers the house that was here before. The Bennett house. He used to go to school with the Bennett kids. He got stoned, many times, in their unfinished basement, while the laundry tumbled around and around in the giant old machines on one side of the room.
    That house is long gone. Lynn and Tom squeezed within the property lines a giant gabled manse that stretches out, almost meeting the edges of the plot. There is room for a small pool, with a high white fence to keep the neighbors out.
    The floors of the giant house are a bleached driftwood gray, shiny chandeliers hanging wherever you look. Beautiful furniture has been tastefully arranged by a decorator, huge clamshells filled with tall white orchids, shelves dotted with the odd vase, a shagreen box, three artfully stacked coffee-table books. Everywhere there are vast gaps of empty space. Dominic has often wondered if there is a junk room somewhere, a small cozy space that houses all the
stuff
, a room that feels like part of a home. Because this isn’t a home. This is a magazine spread. He often finds himself wondering how Lynn and Tom actually live in this space rather than tiptoeing around trying to keep everything perfect.
    More and more frequently, Dominic finds himself around families like this. The husbands are gone most of the week, the wives rattling around in these giant, beautiful, soulless houses. He is aware that as one of the few fathers present, he is something of an . . . attraction? Distraction? He is aware—and it has taken him a very long time to fully realize this—that with his golden Italian-American complexion, his thick dark hair, his big brown eyes, and, okay, he’ll go there, his butt (every girlfriend he has ever had has gone on and on about his butt), he’s a welcome addition to the Mommy and Me groups.
    If he hadn’t gotten involved with the parents of other children, he would have gone out of his mind with boredom when