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

bright blue cat-festooned glazed cloth. “Do you like hazelnut? It’s all we drink.”

Jake, who loathed all flavored coffees, attested that he did.

“Sylvie, where’s that library book?”

“I haven’t seen it,” said Sylvia. “Cream?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

She brought him the mug. It was white with a black line drawing of a cat on it, and the words “Feline Good.”

“There’s donuts,” said Betty. “That’s where I was coming from. You know Jones’ Donuts in town?”

“Well, no,” he said. “I don’t know the town at all. I was really just driving through. I wasn’t expecting all this Vermont hospitality!”

“I have to admit,” said Sylvia, who came bearing a plate of oversized glazed donuts, “I sneaked a look at Google on my phone. You’re obviously who you said you are. If not I’d be out back calling the troopers. In case you thought we’re all hospitality and no common sense.”

“Oh.” Jake nodded. “Good.” He was relieved he hadn’t lied, out in the car. He was relieved that his recent proclivity for lying hadn’t fully replaced a default instinct to tell the truth.

“I can’t believe this place used to be run-down. You could never tell that, now!”

“I know, right? But trust me, the whole first year we were spackling and painting, peeling off old wallpaper. There hadn’t been any serious upkeep in years. Which shouldn’t have surprised us. People actually died in this house because of bad maintenance.”

“No maintenance,” Betty said. She had returned, bringing her own coffee.

“What do you mean? Like a fire?”

“No. Carbon monoxide leak. From the oil furnace.”

“Really!”

The enormous gray cat had trailed Betty into the kitchen. Now he leapt into her lap and settled himself down.

“Does that weird you out?” She looked at Jake. “House this old, it stands to reason people have died in it. Home births, home deaths. Just how things were done back then.”

“Doesn’t weird me out.” He tried a sip of his coffee. It was vile.

“I don’t like to say this,” said Betty, “but your old student died here, too. Upstairs in one of the bedrooms.”

Jake nodded solemnly.

“Hey, so I have to ask,” said Betty, “what was it like, meeting Oprah?”

He told them about Oprah. They were big Oprah fans.

“Are they gonna make a movie out of your book?”

He talked about that, too. Only then could he try to bring the conversation back to Evan Parker, though even as he did he wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. These two might live in the Parker house, but so what? It wasn’t as if they’d ever met him.

“So my old student grew up here,” he finally said.

“That family was in this house from the time it was built. They owned the quarry. You probably passed the quarry, driving here.”

“I think I did.” He nodded. “Must have been a wealthy family.”

“Back then, sure,” said Betty. “But not for a long time. We got a little grant from the state to help with the restoration. We just had to agree to put it on the Christmas house tour when we were finished.”

Jake looked around. There was nothing he’d seen since coming inside that merited the word “restoration.”

“That sounds fun!”

Sylvia made an unhappy noise.

Betty said, “Sure, a hundred strangers stomping through your rooms, trailing snow. But we took the money, so we kept up our side of the bargain. Lot of people around West Rutland were dying to see the inside of this house, and that was nothing to do with the work we’d done. People knew this house their whole lives. And the family.”

Sylvia said, “That family had the worst luck.”

There it was again, that phrase, only by now it didn’t strike Jake as all that surprising. By now he had the relevant information: all four of them had died, Evan Parker and his sister and their parents, three of the four of them under this very roof. He supposed they were collectively deserving of the term “worst luck.”

“I didn’t know he’d died, till recently,” said Jake. “Actually, I still don’t know how.”

“Overdose,” Sylvia said.

“Oh no. I didn’t know he had that problem.”

“Nobody did. Or at least that he still had the problem.”

“I shouldn’t say this,” said Betty, “but my sister was in a certain anonymous group with Evan Parker. It met in the basement of the Lutheran church in Rutland. And he was a longtime member of that group, if you take my meaning.” She paused. “Lot of very shocked people.”

“He was in trouble with his business, we heard,” said Sylvia with a shrug. “That kind of pressure, it’s probably not surprising he picked up again. And owning a bar when you’re sober, that couldn’t have been fun.”

“People do it, though,” Betty said. “He managed it for years. Then I guess he stopped managing.”

“Ayuh.”

No one said anything for a moment.

“So you bought the house from Evan’s estate?”

“Not exactly. He had no will, but his sister, the one who’d died earlier, she had a kid. Her kid was the heir. Not the sentimental type, that one.”

“Oh no?” Jake said.

“She must’ve waited all of a week after her uncle died to put it on the market. The shape the place was in.” Sylvia shook her head. “If it hadn’t been for this one, nobody’d have come near it. Fortunately for her, Betty always loved this place.”

“I used to think it was haunted, when I was a little kid,” Betty confirmed.

“We made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.” Sylvia got up to lift another cat off the kitchen counter. “Or I guess we did. We never met her in person. Just dealt with the attorney.”

“That was no cakewalk,” said Betty. “He was supposed to get all the crap down in the basement cleared out.”

“And the attic. And half the rooms had stuff in them. I don’t know how many times we wrote to that joker, Gaylord.”

“Gaylord, Esquire,” Betty rolled her eyes.

“That guy,” said Sylvia, grinning. “He put that Esquire on everything. Like, we get it. You went to law school. Insecure much?”

“Finally we told him we were having it all sent to the dump