Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,95

been kind to him and his sister, and often fun to be with. Despite their guilt over liking Melinda, which he and Anna knew upset their mother, they couldn’t help themselves after the first few months of trying to ignore Melinda’s attempts at friendship. Their young stepmother had known which rock bands they liked and seemed genuinely to like them too. She had let them eat pizza three nights in a row and have ice cream for lunch or breakfast when their father wasn’t home. She had not tried to make them talk when they didn’t feel like it, but when they did, she had told them tasteless, hilarious jokes and had given them surprise gag gifts like Silly String and a machine that made fart noises and Halloween masks at times of the year nowhere close to October 31. She had cooked them special meals and braided them friendship bracelets that their school friends had envied and wanted for themselves. She had told them about her childhood and what had seemed to her an interminable adolescence, the boys she’d had crushes on in high school who hadn’t noticed her, the sports she was too uncoordinated to play, the way her mother, off-kilter since Melinda’s father left when Melinda was seven, had sometimes made her give the dog and her little brother a bath together in a steel tub in the front yard on hot summer nights, something that had embarrassed her almost as much as it had delighted her.

The first sentence of her book saddened Will, but he had half expected this: Every little girl wants to grow up and marry a prince, and I guess that I was no exception. The whole book saddened him, and he felt like finding her and telling her that he’d had no idea that she had suffered as much as she had. No surprise that he hadn’t much noticed her misery though—he had been a teenager most of the time she’d been married to his father—but he still felt bad that she seemed to have lived through a hellish era of jealousy and self-doubt and emotional abuse, if her accounts of Renn’s treatment of her were to be believed. He had to assume that there was some, if not an inordinate, amount of truth to them. He remembered his father and her arguing several times and Melinda crying once or twice, but he knew that she had tried to hide their disagreements, had smiled after Renn had left the house in a huff, had told them they could go out to eat or she would teach them how to drive her car, which was a Jaguar and beautiful, even though they hadn’t yet gotten their learner’s permits. If their father had known about these lessons, he would have been angry.

What she wrote about Anna and him was generous: that she had thought they were sweet kids, well behaved for the most part, a few temper tantrums but that was to be expected. They had always remembered her birthday and had once baked her a banana cake, which was her favorite, and it had been a good cake too. (How had his mother felt, he wondered, reading this passage? He and Anna had never told her about the banana cake, and Will knew that she had read Melinda’s memoir, even though she had not wanted to discuss it with him, other than to say that some of it had surprised her. Some of it had upset her too, though she had anticipated as much.)

He wondered if Melinda regretted publishing the book now that it was out all over the world. If she regretted the fact that she would now never be able to reach Renn again, because in the rarefied realm where he lived, as she had put it in one section, “very few people had kitchen privileges.” She had probably made him an enemy for life, if he hadn’t felt that they already were enemies. All that his father had said to him about Melinda’s book was, “It’s out there and I have to live with it. Or rather, now I have to ignore it. It’ll die down though. After a few months, most books drop out of sight, especially the trashiest ones.”

“You hope,” Will had said.

His father had given him a considering look. “Yes,” he’d said, “but I’m ninety-eight percent sure I’m right.”

Will had allowed an entire week to pass without replying to Elise’s message about the proposal she had turned