SOMEONE ELSE'S CHILD by NANCY WOODRUFF

Author:NANCY WOODRUFF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 2000-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

MATT

JENNIE HAD CALLED IT drudge work but it wasn’t so bad. His fingers flew over the keyboard and he liked reading what people had to say about their lives. He was always interested in the little patterns he saw. “Look,” he’d call to Jennie, “six of the Sheldrake ’80s have become engineers and married dental hygienists.”

He learned quickly that Jennie had a fascination with names and tried to point out the interesting ones to her. The St. Bernie’s class of 1950 was good for little-old-man types of names, names that sounded to Matt like they should be from some Flannery O’Connor or Eudora Welty story. Ambrose Clemmo. Byno Thibaud. “Look at this,” he said. “A Schmeckabier and a Schmeckpepper in the same class.”

“Big German population, I guess,” Jennie said.

She loved the names that sounded medieval or Shakespearean, romantic in a way. He found a Gabriel D’Arcangelo for her, a Serenissima Luce, a Jacob Caliban. “Oh my,” Jennie said, “Mr. Caliban must be destined to speak in rhyming couplets.”

Matt’s favorite task came when Jennie let him track down lost alumni, calling all seven Sue Johnsons in Hartford, Connecticut, to find out which one had graduated from Hill Top High in 1981. Jennie made him keep a log of how many phone minutes it took to find somebody. She wanted to know exactly how much everything cost.

Jennie was a funny combination of being really meticulous and organized about work and very lax about her house, which was always a mess, with dishes in the sink and a laundry basket on the couch and baby spit-up cloths draped everywhere like doilies. Half the time he was sure she wore yesterday’s clothes. It was oddly sexy to him. He pictured her dropping her clothes on the floor when she got into bed and then stepping back into them in the morning. Sometimes he was sure she must have slept in them. She was so different from Tara, who was so tiny and neat. Jennie was curvy with these astounding breasts.

And of course Matt never actually saw Tara herself at Jennie’s. He didn’t know if she purposefully planned to miss him or if that’s just how it turned out. It didn’t feel right to ask Jennie about Tara. At first he was burning to know things about Tara—if she liked to stretch out on the couch where he sometimes sat with Alison, which chair she sat in at the kitchen table, which of the CDs piled next to the stereo were hers—but as the days started to go by, he thought of it as Jennie’s house or his office, the place where he worked, together with Jennie and Alison, eight hours a day, five days a week.

Jennie had an amazing collection of books, all stuffed into bookshelves that lined each room, and she began loaning them to him—books he would have never known to read, books they talked about when they took their lunch break each day.

He was glad Jennie Breeze’s house was clear on

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
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.