The Plot by Jean Korelitz (good books to read for teens txt) 📕

a green Volvo slowed beside him and turned in to the driveway. Jake grabbed for the key and turned it in the ignition, but already the driver had climbed out and was giving him an unequivocally friendly wave. She was a woman about his own age with a long and very red braid down her back. Despite the baggy coat she wore, it was obvious that she was rail thin. She was calling something. He rolled down his window.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

Now she was walking toward his car, and the New Yorker in Jake cringed: Who took this kind of a chance with a total stranger parked outside your home? Evidently, a Vermonter did. She came closer. Jake began grasping for some explanation of why he was here, but he couldn’t think of anything, which was probably why he ended up with a version of the truth.

“I’m so sorry. I think I knew somebody who once lived here.”

“Oh yeah? Had to be a Parker.”

“Yes. He was. Evan Parker.”

“Sure.” The woman nodded. “You know, he passed away.”

“I heard. Anyway, sorry to bother you. I was just driving through town and I thought, you know, I’d pay my respects.”

“We didn’t know him,” the woman said. “Sorry for your loss.”

The irony of that, of being offered condolences for Evan Parker, nearly made him confess right there. But he produced the required noises. “Thanks. I was his teacher, actually.”

“Oh yeah?” she said again. “In the high school?”

“No, no. It was a writing program. Up at Ripley? In the Northeast Kingdom.”

“Ayuh,” she said, like a true Vermonter.

“My name’s Jake. Your house is gorgeous.”

At this, she grinned. She had distinctly gray teeth, he noticed. Cigarettes or tetracycline.

“I’m trying to get my partner to repaint the trim. I don’t like that green. I think we need to go darker.”

It took him a moment to understand that she actually wanted him to weigh in on this issue. “You could go darker,” he said finally. It seemed to be the right answer.

“I know! My partner, she hired the painter one weekend I was out of town. She pulled a fast one on me.” The woman grinned at this. She wasn’t holding much of a grudge, in other words. “My name’s Betty. You like to see the inside?”

“What? Really?”

“Why not? You’re not an ax murderer, are you?”

The blood rushed to Jake’s head. For the briefest moment he wondered if he was.

“No. I’m a writer. That’s what I taught up at Ripley.”

“Yeah? Have you published anything?”

He turned off the car and slowly stepped out. “A couple of books, yeah. I wrote a book called Crib?”

Her eyes widened. “Seriously? I got that out of the library. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to.”

He held out his hand and she shook it. “That’s great. I hope you like it.”

“Oh my god, my sister’s gonna lose her shit. She said I had to read it. She said I wouldn’t see the twist coming. ’Cause I’m the person who leans over in the movie and tells you, five minutes in, what’s gonna happen. It’s like a curse.” She laughed.

“That is a curse,” Jake agreed. “Hey, it’s really nice of you to invite me in. I mean, I’d love to see it. Are you sure?”

“Sure! I wish I didn’t just have a library copy! If I had my own copy you could sign it.”

“That’s okay. I’ll send you a signed copy when I get home.”

She looked at him as if he’d promised her a Shakespeare First Folio.

He followed her up the tidy driveway and through the large wooden front door. Betty, as she opened the door, prepared the way by calling: “Sylvie? I’ve got a guest.”

He could hear a radio going off somewhere in the back of the house. Betty reached down to scoop up an enormous gray cat and turned back to Jake. “Give me a sec,” she said, and went down the hall. He was trying to take it all in, greedily recording details. There was a wide wooden staircase ascending from a very grand central hallway that had been painted a fairly stomach-churning pink. To his right, a large parlor visible through an open door, and to his left, an even more formal living room through an open archway. The dimensions and the details—dentil crown molding, high baseboards—were a highly intentional display of wealth, but Betty and Sylvia had pretty much bludgeoned any trace of grandeur to death with folksy signs: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE … AND A CAT! and CRAZY CAT LADY lined the wall up the stairs, and visible above the parlor mantelpiece was LOVE IS LOVE). There was also a cacophony of too-bright area rugs, all but obliterating the wooden floorboards, and everywhere Jake looked, too much of everything: tables covered with knickknacks and vases of flowers too healthy and bright to be real, and so many chairs pulled into a circle it looked as if a group was expected, or had recently left. He tried to imagine his former student here: descending this staircase, following Betty’s steps into the kitchen he assumed was at the end of the hall. He couldn’t do it. The women had placed a kitsch-encrusted barrier between whatever had been here before and what was here now.

Betty returned, without the cat but with a stout dark woman in a batik headscarf. “Sylvia, my partner,” she said.

“Oh my god,” said Sylvia. “I can’t believe this. A famous author.”

“Famous author is an oxymoron,” said Jake. It was his go-to assertion of personal modesty.

“Oh my god,” said Sylvia again.

“Your house is just beautiful. Inside and out. How long have you been here?”

“Just a couple of years,” said Betty. “It was so run-down when we moved in, you wouldn’t believe it. We had to replace every damn thing.”

“Some of them twice,” said Sylvia. “Come on back, have some coffee.”

The kitchen had its own complement of signage: SYLVIA’S KITCHEN (SEASONED WITH LOVE) over the stove, HAPPINESS IS HOMEMADE above the table, which was itself covered with a