Infinite Home: A Novel by Alcott Kathleen

Author:Alcott, Kathleen [Alcott, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Coming of Age, Family Life, Literary, United States, Women's Fiction, Contemporary Women, Domestic Life, Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9780698184190
Google: 5cxJBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00SI0B6KW
Barnesnoble: B00SI0B6KW
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015-08-04T05:00:00+00:00

OVERNIGHT IT HAD TURNED to thick summer. The smells were large—chalky baked soil, barbecue smoke, discarded plastics, rush hour excess—and they squabbled and rivaled for dominance. Thomas and Claudia and Edward sat on the stoop together in light clothing, looking for the youthful feeling the setting and season had once suggested to them, as though soon they might jump in a taxi and pay the driver and meet someone singular and change their life in one night, as though any of them could sustain that kind of mobility and reinvention. Edith’s son had temporarily flown back to whichever place he came from, and it afforded them a short window in which to discuss things, develop a plan if there was one to be had. Thomas was the only one intent on action. Because he sat there full of thoughts of Adeleine and Edith and their need, his convictions were stronger than any that would have developed on behalf of his own well-being.

“Really, I could just move,” Edward said in a clipped voice. “We all could.”

Claudia released the sigh that had been growing, lowered her shoulders, and dragged a palm down her face.

“Right now,” she offered lowly, “right now I can’t—” She didn’t finish the sentence, and it remained unclear what it was she couldn’t do, but the hazy answer seemed to arrange itself in the clotted air between them: possibly anything.

Thomas wondered which angle to dance around first: his somewhat-reciprocated love for an unstable person who had cultivated a little false universe on the top floor, the deconstruction of which would mean a swift blow to her sanity, or his belief that the old woman with a bittersweet fever in her brain shouldn’t lose her last years to a son who didn’t care about how she lived them.

He chose the second, hoping that the people who shared the decaying staircase possessed the decency he suspected. He mentioned Owen and the loveless way he looked at Edith, reminded them of the open-door policy she kept for her tenants, how she had welcomed all of them for a bit of conversation or understanding silence, depending on what their lives were lacking. Did they remember that six-day blizzard, how on the fourth day she’d been the only one with groceries left and brought them all downstairs for dinner? Hadn’t they all relaxed in the circle of her generosity, the jingle of bells she’d hung on the door, the forgiving wave of her hand when rent was late?

“Listen,” interrupted Edward. “I’m not going to sit here and say that the old lady deserves to die in some home, playing nonsensical checkers with incontinent zombies. Or that her son’s a fantastic guy for rooting for her bucket to kick so he can put in granite countertops and make a cool several million. Clearly the man has a Laundromat for a soul. But I don’t see what we can possibly do besides put our little tchotchkes in little box-kes.”

Claudia, who had been hiding her red

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