The House on Juniper Lane: A Family Saga Your Book Club Will Argue About

Part One: What the Lake Keeps

The kitchen floor had gone soft in the corner by the icebox, and Ruth Ann Poole was on her hands and knees trying to decide if she should tell Vera or just keep her mouth shut.

She pressed her palm against the boards. They gave under her hand like bread dough. The storm last week had pushed the lake up through the floor drain, and the water had sat there two days before anyone noticed, because nobody went into that corner of the kitchen unless they had to. The icebox hadn't worked since before the war. It just stood there holding old flower vases and a bag of mothballs.

"You're going to ruin your knees on that floor," Vera said from the doorway.

"They're already ruined. Yours will be too if you don't fix this."

Ruth Ann sat back on her heels. The water stains spread out from the corner in long brown shapes, and she had been staring at them too long, the way you stare at clouds. One looked like Italy, the boot, she was sure of it. Another looked like it could be Africa if you squinted. She would never see either place. She knew that. She had made her peace with it the way you make peace with a lock of gray hair. But it was something, finding countries on a kitchen floor.

"You see that one?" she said. "That's Italy."

"That's a leak."

"It's Italy. Toe and all."

Vera came over and looked down. She had her sleeves rolled up and her hair pinned back the way she always wore it, and there was flour on her forearm from the bread she'd started that morning. Vera Calloway was fifty-two years old and owned the biggest house on Juniper Lane, and she still got up at five every day to bake her own bread, like she was afraid somebody was going to come take the flour back.

"Huh," Vera said. "I see it."

"And that one there could be Africa."

"That one there could be a bill I can't afford."

Ruth Ann laughed and hauled herself up using the counter. Her knees cracked like someone stepping on ice. "You can afford it. Don't give me that."

"I can afford some of it. There's a difference."

That was how Vera talked about the house. Some of it. A difference. As if the house were a bill she was paying down to God and the balance never showed on the statement.

Ruth Ann had been coming to this house for thirty-one years, since she was twenty-two and Vera was twenty-one and neither of them knew what was coming. She had come when Vera worked here, back when the Whitakers owned it and Vera scrubbed these same floors on these same knees. She had come after, when the house became Vera's, in that strange spring of 1966 that nobody in Alder Falls had ever gotten a clean story about.

She knew every sound the house made. She knew which stair creaked third from the top, and how the west windows rattled when the wind came off the lake, and how the front parlor stayed cold all year, even in July, like the room had decided on its own to hold a grudge. The house was a drafty old Victorian with a tower on one corner and a widow's walk on the roof, and it was too big for one woman and it ate money the way a stove eats wood, and Ruth Ann loved it almost as much as Vera did, which she would never say out loud because it wasn't hers to love.

"Where are the kids?" Ruth Ann asked.

"June's at the library. Eddie's down at the dock, where he shouldn't be."

"It's July. Boys go to docks in July."

"He's ten."

"He's eleven."

"He's ten until I say otherwise." Vera wiped her flour ...