Last Summer by Holly Chamberlin Read Free Book Online Page A

was odd, because Petey was the easy child. It was very unlike him to make a fuss about anything, but make a fuss he had. She would keep a close eye on him for the next day or two. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe some bigger kid at day camp was picking on him. The bullying epidemic loomed large in Frannie’s mind these days.
    Already in her worn and fraying flannel nightgown, Frannie left her room for the house’s one bathroom. In a perfect world she would at least have a powder room on the first floor, but it was not a perfect world. Unflinchingly, she looked at her face in the mirror over the sink. Her eyes, once what her first boyfriend way back in high school had called chocolate brown, now looked downright muddy. Dark circles surrounded them and a spray of fine lines (Be real, she told herself, they’re wrinkles) shot from the outer corners of both. Her complexion had muddied, too, in spite of using lots of moisturizer (generic brand, of course) each morning and night. She supposed she should have been using some product that claimed to lighten and brighten the skin, too, but it was too late now. Besides, what did it matter? She was pretty sure nobody really looked at her anymore, other than to see the cookie-cutter outline of Employee or Mother. And the last thing she wanted to do was date. No. Way. So what did it matter if Frances Giroux the person became invisible by the time she was forty? That was most women’s fate, anyway, to fade away quietly. Frannie didn’t have the energy to be one of those women who refused to go gently into social oblivion. Helen Mirren she was not.
    Frannie sighed and turned to the process of brushing her teeth. She was only thirty-eight years old, but most times felt as if she were at least sixty. An old sixty, not a Helen Mirren kind of sixty-something. But unless a fairy godmother was going to magically offer her a free lifelong membership at a gym and an endless number of complimentary massages and facials, she was going to continue slogging along toward middle age with her wrinkles and sags and bulges. Amen. There were certainly more important matters with which to concern herself, like what had been going on with Meg. And like her own sense of responsibility and guilt.
    Frannie turned out the light in the bathroom and walked back down the hall to her bedroom. As she passed Meg’s room she noted that her light was still on. She hoped her daughter was reading something a little more substantial than a fashion magazine, like one of the books she was supposed to read for her new English teacher. Petey’s light was out. He had fallen asleep right after dinner, another indication that something might be bothering him. Or maybe, Frannie thought, I’m becoming a professionally nervous parent.
    She quietly closed the bedroom door behind her. Well, maybe she was right to be nervous. Their family situation often meant that Frannie didn’t have the time to pay enough attention to her children, especially to her daughter, who was at that tender and often powder-keg age when the simplest incidents or the most innocent words could seem dire and dramatic and miscommunication between the old and young was the unfortunate norm.
    Frannie pretty much collapsed into the bed she and Peter had bought when they were first married. Though she was bone tired, she knew within a minute of settling the light covers over her body that she would not be able to sleep for some time. Usually, she was snoring not long after her head hit the pillow (Meg had complained about the snores keeping her awake), but in the last weeks she had endured more and more near-sleepless nights. And a sleepless night did not make for a particularly easy day, especially not with Frannie’s job. For the past ten years she had been employed as the office manager for a midsized lumber supplier and home improvement company called Le Roi Lumber and Homes. Appropriately enough, it was owned and operated by a family named King. The