The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online

Lorelei, piling up the plates from her side of the table. ‘This really is about the silliest plan I’ve ever heard. And even if we can afford it – andwho’s to say that the Millers and Bob won’t change their minds, leaving us with a stonking great unpaid debt to some tacky holiday company – if it’s going to be our last Easter all together, then it has to be here! At the Bird House. Isn’t that right, kiddos?’
    A terrible silence fell upon the table. Rory cast his gaze down to his lap. Bethan nibbled her fingernails and Rhys stared at the ceiling. Megan looked intently through the kitchen window at a magpie bouncing on the branches of a tree outside, and tried not to read too much symbolism into its presence at this precise moment.
    ‘
I’d
like to go away,’ said Megan, taking the lead as the firstborn child. ‘I mean, I know I’ll always be able to come back here as the years go by, but once I leave home, who knows if we’ll ever get the chance to go on holiday together again?’ She shrugged and left her words hanging.
    There was a small shard of silence, during which Colin nodded encouragingly and Lorelei raised her eyebrows exasperatedly.
    ‘What about you?’ he asked Beth.
    She smiled apologetically and said, ‘I want to do whatever everyone else wants to do.’
    ‘Rory?’
    ‘Cool,’ said Rory. ‘Yeah. Brilliant.’ Then he looked slightly embarrassed by his betrayal and turned away.
    ‘Rhys?’
    Rhys blushed and shrugged. ‘Don’t mind,’ he said almost silently.
    ‘Well, there you go,’ said Lorelei triumphantly, holdingthe pile of plates out in front of herself. ‘Looks like nobody’s particularly interested. And I’m sure we can think of better things to spend all that money on. I mean, Meggy will be off to college next September. That’ll be an expensive enterprise.’
    Colin frowned and said, ‘You know my mother’s offered to help us out with all that, so that’s not an issue, darling.’
    ‘Well,’ she said, landing the pile of plates into the butler’s sink with a deafening clatter, ‘I still don’t see the point of spending all that money on a holiday that nobody’s really interested in.’
    Meg stared at the shape of her mother, rigid and too thin, at the kitchen sink, her shoulder blades protruding through the chambray cotton of her smocked tunic, and she swallowed the urge to walk over to her and hit her with her cutlery, hard, around the back of the head. Instead she inhaled and said, ‘Erm, I think I recall saying that
I
wanted to go, Mother?’
    ‘And me,’ said Rory.
    Lorelei’s shoulders slumped and she sighed. And then, very slowly and deliberately, she left the kitchen, sobbing quietly under her breath.
    On 25 July that same year, while Lorelei was out at the shops, and Megan was violently kissing Andrew Smart on a blanket in a field in the middle of nowhere, and the twins and Bethan were alone in the house, two sixteen-year-old boys wearing hooded jackets broke in and took, after a leisurely exploration, the video player, two television sets, a watch, some jewellery, and a leg of lamb and a joint of beef from the chest freezer in the utility room. They did allof this without disturbing any of the three children in the house, and it was only when they let the kitchen door bang shut behind them that Rhys peered over his window ledge just in time to see them running down the garden path and on to the street. He rushed then to a window overlooking the street and saw them pile into a matt black Ford Escort and screech away through the village, whooping and hollering through the opened windows as though they thought they were in Harlem.
    Rhys found the whole episode thrilling beyond words. He called 999 before he even told the others, for fear that someone else would want to do it. And for a few days afterwards he dined out on the whole episode, to the point of being boring. But Lorelei couldn’t see the harmless drama of the thing. She could only see it