Free The Geometry of Sisters by Luanne Rice

glanced at Beck; safe in the car, she didn't seem to mind the water.
    They turned inland, and the landscape gave way to rolling hills and thickets of beach roses, gorse, bayberry and laurel. The farther they got from the sea, the more the neighborhood started to feel like home.
    Maura watched Beck notice the Fifth Ward's smaller houses, the tidy yards, the basketball hoops in the driveways. She drove north on Spring Street, silently glancing down the side street that led toward Blackstone's Alley, then past St. Mary's, the big Catholic Church where Jacqueline Bouvier had married John F. Kennedy.
    They crossed Memorial Boulevard, passed the Franklin Spa— the lunch counter where she and Katharine used to meet—then Trinity Church, the white church with the tall steeple and quiet churchyard; she pointed out the two-family red house across the street from the small cemetery where she and Katharine had had their apartment. Ten minutes later, they wound up in the Point section on Narragansett Bay, just south of the Newport Bridge.
    The eighteenth-century houses here were lovely, well kept, neatly painted clapboard with center chimneys, much more modest than the marble and limestone palaces of Bellevue Avenue. These colonial-era houses had been built by sea captains, fishermen, merchants, tradespeople, and shipbuilders. She saw Beck relax a little more, feeling not so overwhelmed by size and status.
    “See?” Maura said. “Not every house in Newport is a mansion.”
    “I like this neighborhood,” Beck said. “Who lives here?”
    “Regular people,” Maura said.
    “You mean people who don't go to Newport Academy,” Beck said.
    “You might be surprised,” Maura said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Newport Academy was founded by a man who lived in this neighborhood,” she said, thinking of J.D.'s grandfather. “He came from Ireland with nothing. He worked hard building ships, and made a lot of money. But no matter how much he made, he felt hisfamily could never get ahead enough to be accepted by Newport society.”
    “I told you, they're horrible!” Beck said.
    “He decided his children needed a good education. They couldn't get into the other private schools, so he built one for them.”
    “Newport Academy?” Travis asked.
    “Yes,” Maura said.
    “A man from this neighborhood built that fancy mansion?” Beck asked.
    “He did,” Maura said. “He wanted to attract children from all walks of life, and he knew the robber barons wouldn't send their kids unless the school had everything the other schools had.”
    “What was his name?” Beck asked.
    “James Desmond Blackstone.”
    “How do you know all this?” Travis asked.
    Maura hesitated, gazing out at the water. The Newport Bridge was close by, and its white lights were starting to twinkle in the violet twilight. “I knew his great-grandson a long time ago,” she said. “He told me.”
    “What's
that?”
Beck asked suddenly, sounding shocked as she pointed at the carved pineapple above the doorway of the Georgian colonial Hunter House.
    “Fruit, Beck,” Travis said. “Try not to freak out.”
    “The pineapple is a symbol of Newport,” Maura said. “It means welcome…. When sea captains would return from their voyages, they'd bring pineapples from the South Seas, and their families would place them over the door to invite people to visit.”
    For some reason that tale made Beck slouch down in her seat and grow quiet again, so Maura kept driving through the narrow streets. She thought of James Desmond Blackstone and the night J.D. had told her about the origins of Newport Academy; they had been sitting on a cement wall by one of the public driftways to the water,within sight of his great-grandfather's house. The bridge lights had sparkled overhead that night too.
    “This is where you came from?” Maura had asked him.
    “It's where my great-grandfather first lived when he came to America,” he'd said. “So yes, because of him, I come from right