Free Ann Brashares - The Last Summer (of You and Me) by Ann Brashares Page B

downstairs. This had been a darkroom, a painting studio, and a recording studio, and briefly housed a loom for weaving. All this was in accordance with her father's changing hobbies and delusions, the delusions requiring more radical renovation and expensive equipment than the hobbies. By now the room had ves tiges of all of these, plus a plastic crate of free weights. By now it was a storage room and an archive.

    Alice suspected that if it was her mother's father who'd died in the spring of 1981 and left them a hundred thousand dollars, then the little room would have been a guest room or a den or, best of all, a writing studio for her private use. Alice's father did not make much money in his job as a private-school teacher and a coach, but his father, Alice's grandfather, had been a successful lawyer. And though Grandpa Joseph had been a notorious gambler at the horse track, he had provided the windfall that bought them this house and, moreover, bought them entry into this world of plenty where they did not otherwise belong.

    The single great luxury of the house was the trumpet vine that

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    grew around the arbor and fence, an extravagance of orange flowers and attendant hummingbirds. It was a mystery to all of them. Their potted tomato plants yellowed, the vinca rotted, and the basil plant withered. Their cultivation failed, but their accident prospered.

    Sometimes the vines got to be so much that you could feel the fence straining under them. So Alice and her father took to the vines with giant clippers, laying violent siege to their one glory. But the flowers always came back more and more, like disap pointed children or thwarted desires.

    Every south-facing second-floor window, including the two in Alice's bedroom, looked directly at Paul's family's grand three- story shingle. She thought of Tolstoy when she considered its generic, platonic beauty, compared to the unique homeliness of her house. The outside of his house was part of her landscape, but the inside she hardly knew at all. The windows stayed dark at night, so you couldn't even see in. It was more an idea to her than a place. For every thousand hours Paul had spent at her house, she 'd spent one at his. Paul's empty house looked at the ocean, and they at it.

    You would have thought Paul's house had been built after theirs--islanders were always grabbing up one another's views. But in fact, his house had been standing since the nineteen- twenties, though it had to be picked up and moved shortly after the hurricane of 1938. The builder of their meek house had actually chosen to lean it into the shadow of a great and substantial one. It seemed to Alice further proof of the builder's poor self-esteem.

    "So, Paul." Judy reinvigorated her line of questioning over Ethan's grilled pork chops, as dense and hard as roofing tile. "What are you planning to do in the fall?"

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    Paul did not throw his plate to the floor or suggest that Judy leave him alone. He was always more patient with Judy than her daughters could manage to be.

    "I have to finish up an old incomplete from Cal-Berkeley this summer, and then I'll hopefully be starting a graduate degree in philosophy and political science."

    Judy nodded with obvious approbation. She always had high hopes for Paul.

    "Where are you planning to go?" Ethan asked in his care ful way.

    Alice looked back and forth as though taking in a tennis match. It was more like Canadian doubles, though, and she found herself rooting for the lone man.

    "I have a provisional acceptance from NYU. One of my profes sors at Cal joined the faculty there, and he 's looking on my appli cation kindly," he said. "So I guess that's where I'm headed."

    Alice opened her mouth to speak, but her mother got there first.

    "Well, that is wonderful!" Judy nearly shouted. "You and Alice will be there together. You can see each other all the time." She turned on Alice with a look of