Three Story House: A Novel Read Free Page B

is for people who are finished playing. I’m not finished.”
    “I never said you were.”
    There was a quality to Isobel’s voice that made Lizzie reconsider their conversation. Maybe it wasn’t all about getting her to think about life after soccer, maybe her cousin needed her around. Lizzie paused to rest a minute and leaned against the wall. “I’m just grumpy about all of this.”
    “It doesn’t have to be coaching, you could stay and do something else. I’ll teach you about houses.” Isobel thumped her heel against the floor. “Sanded and stained these myself. You should have seen this place when I bought it. Owners had poured wax down all the drains. Wax.”
    “You can’t escape who you are,” Lizzie said. “Got your mom’s looks and your dad’s passions.”
    Isobel wiggled her ears at Lizzie. Her cousin was the perfect mix of her father and her mother. As a child, when she wasn’t acting, she’d been her father’s shadow—handing him hammers and using fine-grain sandpaper on intricate crown molding. She’d learned to use a jigsaw before taking the training wheels off her bike. When her career had skidded to a halt after her show ended, she put that knowledge to use by leveraging her acting money to buy dilapadated houses around Los Angeles and make them beautiful again. The bungalow Isobel lived in now was actually a duplex, with the rent from the other side covering her mortgage. But she was her mother’s child too. She could be pushy and vain.
    “Am I driving you tomorrow? To that soccer thing?”
    “You mean the holiday party?” Lizzie had no intention of going to the hotel to spend hours decorating store-bought cookies and exchanging secret Santa gifts with her teammates, or rather, former teammates. “I’ve got a therapy appointment,” she said.
    “It’s after that. You know, your coach called me to say how they especially want you to be there, and I don’t mind as long as we figure out how to get out there without hitting much traffic. I heard some of the girls have endorsement deals. They do commercials and stuff, huh?”
    “Nobody there will be of any use to you. All that’s stuff done with the sports media guys—not an actor to be seen for miles. Besides, my being there is bad luck. If this”—Lizzie gestured to her knee—“could happen to me, it could happen to them.”
    “You remember that I’m no good at sympathy, right?” Isobel plaited her flat-ironed hair into a loose braid as she spoke. As beautiful as her cousin was, she had the trappings of a woman who worked at her appearance—the byproduct of being a kid who’d worn thick glasses and picked at her scabs. “I can do two things. I’ll tell it to you straight or I’ll take you out and we’ll have a good time ignoring our problems. Which do you want?”
    “I want Elyse.”
    Isobel adjusted her face, making her cheeks larger and widening her eyes. She spoke in a near-perfect imitation of their cousin’s husky Boston-coated voice. “You’re going to tell me about it and afterward I’ll figure out a way to make it better, even if it means drinking for both of you.”
    “Be kind,” Lizzie said. While Lizzie and Isobel had spent most of their twenties getting exactly what they wanted out of life, Elyse had floundered. She’d started and stopped two dozen careers. The latest misstep had been opening a bed and breakfast. In all the years she’d known Elyse, she’d never seen her cousin get out of bed with time enough to make even so much as toast. “She’s the best at telling us what we should do.”
    “That’s because she listens. You and I”—Isobel made a dramatic show of pointing to each of them—“are terrible at listening.”
    Lizzie smiled. “I didn’t hear you. Did you say I’m amazing?”
    Isobel rolled her eyes in dramatic fashion. “She does all her listening on the phone, which is easy. You can multitask. What do you want to bet that while we’re droning on repeating ourselves,