The Cousins by Rona Jaffe Read Free Book Online

children, a boy and a girl; a warm and manageable size for a family, in her opinion. Dick and Jane without Spot—oh, well. It had never occurred to her that she might have had a sister.
    “I hated being an only child,” Jenny said. “Do you remember how I used to sit on the back porch swing with my dolls all day and pretend they were my children?”
    Olivia nodded.
    “Having children was the most significant thing that happened in my whole life,” Jenny said. “You go into a hospital alone and you come out with another person.”
    “I know,” Melissa said. “I felt that way, too.”
    “How many more are you going to have?” Olivia asked.
    Jenny looked at her aghast. “No more. I’m not crazy.”
    A picture flashed into Olivia’s mind of Jenny holding one of her children as an infant—was it Sam, the firstborn?—at a family party. Jenny was still overweight from her recent pregnancy, her face round, and the baby was chewing on her cheek. How large her face must have seemed to him, like a planet.
    “I was afraid to have kids,” she said. “I was sure I’d be a bad mother.”
    “At least you knew it,” Jenny said.
    So now I’m everything my mother warned me about, Olivia thought. No parents, no siblings, no children, no husband . . . but I have Roger. He’s my husband, my brother, my family. And it may sound crazy, but we have our dogs, and they’re our children.
    “Where are Grady and Taylor?” she asked, looking around.
    “They’re going to drive up tomorrow,” Jenny said. “There’s no point in their spending money on a hotel.”
    “It’s a long trip,” Olivia said.
    “The way you drive, yes,” Melissa said. “The way Grady drives, forty-five minutes.”
    “Do you think Grady’s gay?” Jenny asked. It was a subject the cousins often discussed. It seemed to Olivia that they spent a lot of their time together gossiping about the family, particularly Grady.
    “I asked him once,” Olivia said. “I told him I wouldn’t care, I just wanted him to be happy, but he said he wasn’t gay; he couldn’t have a relationship or get married because he couldn’t trust anybody.”
    “None of us would care,” Jenny said. “It just seems a shame he has to hide it from the family.”
    “Well,” Melissa said, “he’s thirty-five and doesn’t go out with women, and his male friends are all fifteen years younger than he is—do you remember when he came back from that trip and showed us pictures of that hunk?”
    “Aunt Julia used to say they were friends from school,” Olivia said. “Grady would have been in prep school when they were six.”
    “Does Taylor know?”
    “She’d have to know, wouldn’t she?”
    “But he lives with Miranda, or whatever her name is, that actress.”
    “Used to.”
    “They broke up?”
    “I heard.”
    “Are we sure it was a romance?”
    “Well, they lived together. She was supposed to be his girlfriend.”
    “Maybe it was a phase.”
    “Aunt Julia wouldn’t have cared if he was gay. Why is he so secretive?”
    “Well, stuntmen. That world is so macho. Did you ever hear of a gay stuntman?”
    “I’ve heard rumors.”
    Grady. They shrugged and sighed. They had wrung the subject dry, until the next time.
    “It’s hard to be in this family and not be born a Miller,” Jenny said.
    “It’s hard even if you are one,” Melissa said.
    They all smiled at each other, a little ruefully. “But harder if you’re not,” Melissa said to Olivia. “Your mother didn’t like my mother. She never accepted her.”
    Olivia was surprised that Melissa knew. Nobody had liked Hedy, the sharp-tongued outsider sister-in-law, but she hadn’t thought Hedy noticed. “I guess.”
    “They didn’t like my father either,” Jenny said. “He always felt like an outsider, and I identified with him. I always felt like an outsider, too.”
    “Why?”
    “I had different values.”
    “Well, I’m the one they don’t approve of now,” Olivia said. “I take care of