Free The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters by Lucinda Rosenfeld

form of an idyllic suburban park off Edgar’s Lane which featured a jungle gym, baseball field, and community garden. It was by the lamb’s ears that Olympia had had her first kiss back in junior high courtesy of Billy Rudolfo.
    The house in which Olympia had been raised, and in which her parents still lived, was a short walk from the station—up steep West Main Street, now home to a chichi hair salon and French restaurant; past the public library, with its sweeping views of the Hudson; then down Maple Avenue, with its elegant and well-preserved Carpenter Gothic houses with their upside-down V embellishments. From there, it was a left onto dead-ended Edmarth Place. The Hellingers lived one house in from the corner. At the end of the block, you could see straight across the river to the Palisades. Rectangular, striated, and a rich shade of brown, the section of rock that faced Hastings always reminded Olympia of the Russell Stover chocolates that her great-aunt Helen, famous for her piano legs and thunderous laugh, used to bring over for the holidays.
    The block’s other distinguishing feature was that every one of its porch-fronted late Victorians was the mirror image of the one across the street. Or, at least, they had been until people started adding on eat-in kitchens and extra baths. As a child, Olympia had become obsessed with what she imagined to beher “shadow house” across the street and, by extension, “shadow life”—as the deaf daughter of the Lumberts, a children’s book illustrator and UN translator, who kept to themselves. Every morning, just before eight, Victoria Lumbert, who had yellow-blond pigtails, would climb aboard a mysterious school bus. Olympia never found out where she went. And then, one day, a moving truck came, and the Lumberts vanished forever.
    It was Gus who answered the bell—looking marginally spiffier than usual, in black corduroys, a white oxford, and a men’s black suit jacket. Apparently, Carol and Bob were still at the hospital. “Sorry I’m late,” said Olympia. “Work was crazy.”
    “Was it ‘impossibly crazed’? Oh, sorry—that’s Perri’s favorite expression,” said Gus.
    “No, just crazy,” said Olympia, rolling her eyes.
    “Fisticuffs broke out over the correct way to fry a wiener schnitzel?”
    “Something like that,” said Olympia, still deciding whether to laugh along or to be mortally offended by Gus’s clear mockery of her professional life. “Oh, and nice to see you too.”
    “Likewise,” said Gus. Olympia hung up her coat, then followed her younger sister into the living room. In the twenty years since Olympia had left home, her parents had made minimal changes to the decor. It was still a light-challenged mix of wobbly antiques that had been passed down through the family and “contemporary” pieces purchased at Bloomingdale’s in the Galleria mall in White Plains in the 1980s, upholstery now fraying and veneers beginning to chip. Paperback novels that hadn’t been opened in twenty-five years ( Watership Down, The Thorn Birds ) filled every last air pocket of the bookcases. Ethnictchotchkes cluttered every available surface. As empty nesters, Bob and Carol had taken one trip through the unfashionable countries of Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Albania), with a stopover in Athens to see the Parthenon; and another trip through West Africa. The living room walls were deep maroon and decorated with blobby pink monotypes, which were by Carol’s sister, Suzy, and reminiscent of Rorschach inkblot tests or mutant udders, depending on your perspective. For as long as Olympia could remember, the house had smelled faintly yet inexplicably of rubber cement.
    Perri sat cross-legged in Grandpa Bert’s old Morris chair, thumbing through the Times Magazine. The cover story appeared to be about kids with peanut allergies. Hadn’t they run a similar story only twelve months before? “Hey,” said Olympia, taking a seat on the old leather sofa opposite her