Every Last One (39 page)

The girl looked back at Blessings through a stand of birches, white and slender shadows at the edge of the black lawn. “I want to go home,” she finally said.

“School home or home home?”

“Home home,” she said.

Maybe it was the last purring of the car engine, or the faint shriek of the nesting bird that one of the barn cats leaped for, clawed, caught, and then lost, that caused Lydia Blessing to turn fretfully in the big cherry bed that had once belonged to her parents. She’d heard her father’s voice for a moment, that voice strangely high-pitched for such a big man, so that he’d sung tenor parts in the St. Stephen’s choir. Elegant Ed, they’d called him at school. The prettiest penmanship at Princeton, he liked to say, looking down at his copperplate cursive. Lyds my love, he called her. The sound of voices in the night was commonplace to her now, more so, even, than in the old days, when there really had been voices, arguments from the guest bedrooms, conversations from the stragglers on the patio, whispers from someone sneaking into the dark waters of the pond long after the house was closed up.

Lydia Blessing pulled the openwork blanket about her shoulders and fell back to sleep as the box on the garage doorstep shuddered, shimmied, and finally was still.

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THE RANDOM HOUSE
PUBLISHING GROUP

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
NNA
Q
UINDLEN
is the author of five bestselling novels,
Object Lessons, One True Thing, Black and Blue, Blessings
, and
Rise and Shine
. Her
New York Times
column, “Public and Private,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of those columns was published as
Thinking Out Loud
. She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30’s” columns,
Living Out Loud;
a book for the Library of Contemporary Thought,
How Reading Changed My Life;
and the bestselling
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
and
Being Perfect
. From 2000 to 2009, she wrote the “Last Word” column for
Newsweek
.

www.annaquindlen.net

Every Last One
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Anna Quindlen
Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from
Blessings
copyright © 2002 by Anna Quindlen.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Marvell Press for permission to reprint “Going” from
The Less Deceived
by Philip Larkin, copyright © 1955 by Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of The Marvell Press, England and Australia.

eISBN: 978-0-679-60372-6

www.atrandom.com

Cover design: Kathleen DiGrado.
Cover illustration: Debra Lill, based on images © Joshua Sheldon/Getty Images (woman and park), © Tammy Hanratty/Corbis (flowers and frame), ©iStock/Bill Noll (wallpaper).

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