Outside In by Courtney Thorne-Smith
Author:Courtney Thorne-Smith [Thorne-Smith, Courtney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767928519
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-09-18T04:00:00+00:00
18
“Hello! I’m home!” Kate called into the empty foyer, hearing the familiar echo of her mother’s empty house. Even her father, who had paid for every one of the dwellings her parents had called home, referred to each one as “your mother’s house.” Of course, in his case, it was really her mother’s life.
Kate walked down the hall to the kitchen, idly viewing the photos that covered the walls along her route. She noticed something for the first time: her mother was in each and every photo. She was, of course, featured in the holiday photos her parents had done every October at the mall, her mom and dad posed in front of a foggy background of either brown or blue, depending on what they had chosen to wear (or, rather, what her mother had chosen for them to wear). But what Kate now noticed was that Marcia was also in all of her school photos, standing next to the teacher with the other class moms. Kate didn’t have any memories of her mother working at the monthly bake sales or helping out her teachers on craft days, but she did remember watching her mother stride across the school yard in brightly colored dresses and high heels on photo days. She wondered if the other mothers had noticed that Marcia’s version of being a class mom more closely resembled modeling than mothering.
Story of my life, thought Kate, wondering vaguely if her mother was playing the role of perfect mother at that very moment, regaling her Palm Springs friends with stories of her famous daughter—while her famous daughter sat at her house, depressed and alone. Sitting at the kitchen table, Kate waited for a fresh batch of self-pitying tears, but they never arrived. Instead, images of Michael kept floating through her mind. He had been so incredibly sweet this morning that she had come very close to spilling the whole story of her almost divorce and near homelessness, but the habit of protecting personal information was so ingrained in her that she had found herself dodging his direct questions. He probably thought she was a CIA spy protecting state secrets. If she was lucky enough to see him tomorrow, she determined, she would tell him the truth. She would change some names, of course, to protect the innocent…and the slutty. Stop it, she scolded. You should not even be thinking about him.
But he likes me.
It doesn’t matter. You aren’t looking.
Why not?
Because you are heartbroken and humiliated.
So?
So, you moron, that means you need to be miserable.
That’s stupid.
You’re stupid.
Real mature.
You’re mature.
You’re stupid and mature…infinity.
Touché.
“Oh, stop it!” she said aloud, hoping to break the (insane?) cycle of arguing with herself. She should be having this conversation with someone else. Granted, unless that someone else was a snotty nine-year-old, the banter would probably be at a slightly higher intellectual level, but the point was that she shouldn’t be sitting in her mother’s kitchen talking to herself.
She should be talking to her girlfriends. But the truth was, she didn’t have any.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Coloring Books for Grown-Ups | Humor |
Movies | Performing Arts |
Pop Culture | Puzzles & Games |
Radio | Sheet Music & Scores |
Television | Trivia & Fun Facts |
Spell It Out by David Crystal(35846)
Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones(29420)
We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union(18632)
The Secret History by Donna Tartt(18161)
Cat's cradle by Kurt Vonnegut(14759)
The Goal (Off-Campus #4) by Elle Kennedy(13196)
The Social Justice Warrior Handbook by Lisa De Pasquale(11952)
The Break by Marian Keyes(9075)
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan(8886)
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher(8451)
The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro(8393)
Educated by Tara Westover(7689)
The handmaid's tale by Margaret Atwood(7448)
Win Bigly by Scott Adams(6827)
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin(6809)
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz(6438)
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion(5837)
Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty(5825)
The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish(5414)
