The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

would be so much pollen in the air I wouldn’t be able to breathe, and my mother and I would be at each other’s throats within twenty-four hours, but it wouldn’t be here. I took the nearly empty bottle of antacids and ground them into a fine powder against my tongue on the way to the airport, feeling the twist in my stomach as it pulled angrily against itself.
    Ostensibly, my parents had settled in Magnolia because it was in between Memphis and Little Rock, and my father had begun investing in real estate in both cities, but I think they chose it because it was equally inconvenient for both of their families to visit. My mother said she liked it because it was small, barely a city. “Memphis without all the fuss,” she called it, as though Memphis were a latter-day Gotham, all crime-fighting superheroes and threatening skylines. But Magnolia was a Goldilocks city—just large enough to have the cultural amenities my mother enjoyed, just small enough that she could run its social scene with her tiny, well-moisturized fist, just Southern enough for the charm without too much culture shock for my Northern parents, just Northern enough to cool off during the winter months without doing too much damage to my mother’s garden. As much as I complained about it, I’d been in no hurry to escape; it had held me in its slow, sticky thrall until Phillip and I had moved to Chicago.
    I took a taxi to my mother’s house, the driver listening to hypnotically aggressive sports talk radio. He left me there, standing in the circular driveway. My parents had bought this house, an old brick colonial with black shutters and a gabled roof over the front door, when they had married in 1945—my mother only twenty years old, my father a few years older, back from a thankfully bland service in the war. They had periodically remodeled the interior, but the outside looked the same as it had since I was a child. I could smell the honeysuckle and wisteria growing along the side of the house, and the summery, green scent of damp soil. The hedges surrounding the property bore tiny white buds thatwould explode in a few weeks and flower profusely, covering the sidewalk with sticky yellow dust, until they had sown their wild oats and retreated into orderly decency, marking the edge of the property in a military-tight formation.
    My mother’s house was in Briar Hill, where the enormous homes near the country club faded into family neighborhoods and trendy stores. The house next door was even older, the original farmhouse for the land that had turned into this wealthy neighborhood, and for years it had been owned by the Schulers, who were descendants of the family who had built it. My mother preferred that sort of thing, neighborhoods with history and old houses and families who had lived in them for years. The Schulers’ children had already been in high school when I was born, so over the years it had seemed emptier and emptier as they moved out, and the only times it came to life were Christmas and Easter, when everyone streamed home with their own families in tow, or the occasional summer Sunday dinner, when they played croquet in the back yard and ate on the porch while the children chased fireflies in the gathering dark.
    But now it looked like there was a full-on party happening over there. Standing outside my mother’s silent house, I could hear conversation and laughter drifting over the fence, and people moving back and forth inside.
Maybe I should go there instead
, I thought. It sounded like much more fun.
    Before I could make a break for it, the front door swung open and the familiar scent rushed up at me, dust and old books, wood polish and something floral from the arrangement on the table in the front hall, and under it all, the pale, faint traces of my father’s cigars. Even though he had died soon after Phillip and I were married, it still felt painful to think of it. I took a long, slow