The Accidental Book Club by Jennifer Scott Read Free Book Online

me.” She shouldered her purse. “I’ll take myself. Don’t go with me.”
    “You don’t have a car,” Curt said.
    “I’ll take a cab.” And with that, Laura left, pushing past Curt and Bailey and not even bothering to acknowledge Jean at all.
    They all stood in silence, not looking at one another, Laura’s absence filling up the room almost as much as her presence had. Jean could hear her daughter barking orders loudly at the nurse’s station, then the sound fading as she stormed away.
    “Should I follow her?” Jean asked.
    Curt shook his head. “I’ll go with her. Why don’t you head over to the restaurant at your hotel and I’ll meet you there in an hour?”
    Jean nodded and started to say something to Bailey—though she wasn’t sure what. Maybe she should ask her about school or tell her that her new hairstyle looked interesting, or just . . . something that a grandmother should say to a granddaughter. A way to show her granddaughter that she was interested, that she cared. And maybe to bring some normalcy to the teen’s day, if that was even possible. How did you do normal when your mother was huffing off to a rehab center at that very moment?
    But Jean never said anything, and by the time she looked up again, Bailey was gone as if through a magic trick.

FOUR
    Dear Margaret Wise Brown:
    My name is Bailey and I am six years old. My favorite book in the whole world is
Home for a Bunny
by you. My mom reads it to me every night. I love how fluffy the bunny is in the pictures. I would like to pet him sometime.
    I only have two questions for you: Why didn’t the bunny have a home? Where was his mommy bunny?
    Love,
Bailey
Age six
    P.S. My mom is writing this for me, because I don’t know how to make all my letters yet.
    P.P.S. I also like it when my mommy says the “Spring, spring, spring” part in her frog voice. It’s really funny.
    B ailey watched from the loft above the living room.
    She was curled behind the rocking chair, hugging her knees to her chest, her fingers rubbing against her stubbled ankles, digging harder and harder into the skin until she felt soreness there. She pressed her cheek against her knees, a tattered copy of
Anne of Green Gables
trapped between her legs and stomach. It was a book that most of the kids from school deemed “lame” and “old-fashioned,” something they were forced to read in eighth-grade English, but it had always been one of Bailey’s favorites—a story she returned to when she felt like her life was slipping out of control. She couldn’t explain it. Not even to herself, really. All she knew was the book was like an anchor tied around her feet, keeping her tethered to the ground, where things were safe and pretty.
    She would turn the pages, the words practically memorized by now, and picture herself as the imaginative and determined Anne. She would run her fingers over the text—
Marilla, isn’t it wonderful to know that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?—
and try to absorb them through her skin, wishing real life were like that: that you could show up on someone’s doorstep, a mistake, and still end up belonging. Most of the time she felt like she didn’t belong in her own family, if you could still call it a family. Could you still call it a family when the dad was living somewhere else and the mom was living in a bottle and nobody seemed like your kindred spirit anymore? Most of the time, she felt like she was the mistake, and every tomorrow was messed up before it even got there.
    She’d been reading behind the rocking chair for hours, until her eyes got droopy, but now she was just watching. Just waiting for the world to blow up around her.
    After her mother had stomped out of the hospital, and her father had brought Bailey home, she’d “taken off”—stormed out the front door, slammed it behind her angrily, shouted something about how not at all awesome it was that her mom was going to rehab and now she was stuck