Other People's Houses Read online

  Praise for Abbi Waxman and

  The Garden of Small Beginnings

  “Abbi Waxman is both irreverent and thoughtful.”

  —#1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Giffin

  “Brilliant. Simply brilliant. The Garden of Small Beginnings is funny, poignant, and startling in its emotional intensity and in its ability to make the reader laugh and cry on the same page . . . I loved this book!”

  —Karen White, New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street Novels

  “If you’re looking for a summer beach read with meat, this might well be your book . . . Waxman develops and explores the characters and their relationship in depth . . . with moments of humorous writing.”

  —The Washington Post

  “This is my favorite kind of book—hilarious, sad, joyful. Beautifully written. Fun. I dare you not to enjoy it.”

  —Julia Claiborne Johnson, author of Be Frank With Me

  “What a treat!! Abbi Waxman is one of the wittiest voices in the world today. The Garden of Small Beginnings is a beautiful book full of humor, heart, and deep insight. An intimate and hilarious journey about a young mom moving on from grief. Reading it gave me the feeling I was talking to a really funny, open mom-friend sharing secrets about life, love, loss, and gardening! Abbi Waxman’s quick wit and heart shine brightly throughout this debut novel. I just loved it!”

  —Molly Shannon, actress

  “Funny and poignant. Guaranteed to make you laugh and cry. May make you want to play in dirt and grow a new life of your own.”

  —Wendy Wax, USA Today bestselling author of One Good Thing

  “Waxman’s skill at characterization . . . lifts this novel far above being just another ‘widow finds love’ story. Clearly an observer, Waxman has mastered the fine art of dialogue as well. Characters ring true right down to Lilian’s two daughters, who often steal the show. This debut begs for an encore from Waxman.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Waxman takes readers from tears to laughter in this depiction of one woman’s attempt to hold it all together for everyone else only to learn it’s OK to put herself first.”

  —Booklist

  “Kudos to debut author Waxman for creating an endearing and realistic cast of main and supporting characters (including the children). Her narrative and dialog are drenched with spring showers of witty and irreverent humor, which provides much respite from the underlying grief theme.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “The Garden of Small Beginnings is a quirky, funny, and deeply thoughtful book . . . We’re already dying to know if there will be a sequel.”

  —HelloGiggles

  “Waxman’s voice is witty, emotional, and often profound.”

  —InStyle.com (U.K.)

  “This novel is filled with characters you’ll love and wish you lived next door to in real life.”

  —Bustle

  “Sorrow is usually an occasion for sobs instead of laughter, but Waxman manages to wring many funny and poignant moments from a sober situation.”

  —Augusta Chronicle

  “Lilian Girvan, the central character of The Garden of Small Beginnings, is an illustrator, a mother, a sister, a budding gardener, and a widow, and her perspective on how she’s doing with each role doesn’t always match up with what readers can see around her. But that trait makes her a more interesting and realistic protagonist, and along with the book’s humor and eccentric supporting cast made it a great read.”

  —BookRiot

  “Abbi Waxman artfully tackles grief with humor in her debut novel.”

  —Signature Reads

  “It’s impossible not to fall in love with Lilian, a young widow who is still trying to come to terms with the death of her husband four years later . . . If you are thinking to yourself, ‘Forget it, I’m not reading a gardening book,’ don’t worry . . . THIS IS NOT A GARDENING BOOK! It is, however, a feel-good, hate-to-put-it-down kind of book!”

  —Chick Lit Central

  Berkley titles by Abbi Waxman

  THE GARDEN OF SMALL BEGINNINGS

  OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Dorset Square, LLC

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Waxman, Abbi, author.

  Title: Other people’s houses / Abbi Waxman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017046915| ISBN 9780399587924 (softcover) |

  ISBN 9780399587931 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Married people—Fiction.| Adultery—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Humorous. | GSAFD: Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A8936 O85 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046915

  First Edition: April 2018

  Cover art: house by 3dts/GettyImages; bicycle by yattaa/GettyImages; blanket by PlusONE/Shutterstock; cat by oksana2010/Shutterstock

  Cover design by Vikki Chu

  Interior art: wooden fence © Krivosheev Vitaly/Shutterstock.com; neighborhood map by Julia Waxman

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my three daughters: Julia, Charlotte, and Kate. May your lives be free of drama, unless it’s really entertaining.

  And to the children of my neighborhood: Eve, Hannah, Millie, Louis, Avery, Truman, Little Charlotte, Henry, Chela, Sofia, Stella, Nolan, Olivia, Rosetta, Juliette, Ruby Fern, and Nerys. Without you it would be just another place to live.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank everyone at LPQ, Larchmont, and The Hatchery, who give me endless cups of coffee and a place to work: Wilder, Kacy, Vanessa, Carter, Amy, Maria, and Talia. If I’ve forgotten your name, it’s not because I don’t appreciate you, it’s because I’m an idiot.

  I’d like to thank my editor, Kate Seaver, who says positive, constructive things about my work then deftly suggests changes that improve it immeasurably.

  I’d also like to thank Margalo Chellas Goldbach, a lovely, intelligent, and highly creative child, who provided the original version of one of the more impressive tantrums in the book, and who will now, sadly, never be allowed to forget it.

  Lastly, although Larchmont is a real neighborhood in Los Angeles, and many of the sights I describe are real and lovely, all of the characters are completely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people is completely coincidental and unintentional. I used my imagination, as writers are wont to do.

  Contents

  Praise for Abbi Waxman

  Berkley
titles by Abbi Waxman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Cast of Characters

  Map

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  Eleven.

  Twelve.

  Thirteen.

  Fourteen.

  Fifteen.

  Sixteen.

  Seventeen.

  Eighteen.

  Nineteen.

  Twenty.

  Twenty-one.

  Twenty-two.

  Twenty-three.

  Twenty-four.

  Twenty-five.

  Twenty-six.

  Twenty-seven.

  Twenty-eight.

  Twenty-nine.

  Thirty.

  Thirty-one.

  Thirty-two.

  Thirty-three.

  Thirty-four.

  Thirty-five.

  Thirty-six.

  Thirty-seven.

  Thirty-eight.

  Thirty-nine.

  Christmas.

  Readers Guide

  About the Author

  Cast of Characters

  The Bloom Family

  Michael

  Frances

  Ava (14)

  Milo (10)

  Alexandra (Lally) (4)

  The Porter Family

  Charlie

  Anne

  Theo (10)

  Kate (6)

  The Horton Family

  Bill

  Julie

  Lucas (4)

  The Carter-Gillespie Family

  Iris

  Sara

  Wyatt (6)

  One.

  It was amazing how many children you could fit in a minivan, if you tessellated carefully and maintained only the most basic level of safety. Four in the very back, two of whom were painfully wedged in the space normally afforded to one child. A single lap belt over those two, a choice both illegal and stupid, but there you go—and thank goodness they were skinny. Frances Bloom always had this vague belief that, in the event of an accident, the pressure of all those little bodies would hold them in place. Ten seconds with a physicist would have cleared that up, but she didn’t know any; and seeing as she rarely made it above twenty miles per hour in traffic, she might have been right. She was a careful driver, especially with other people’s kids in the car, and so far she hadn’t needed to put her nutball theory to the test.

  In the middle, the two littlest ones sat securely in actual car seats. And next to her in the front, holding sway over the CD player with the attention to power and detail only a teenager could wield, her eldest daughter, Ava. Seven children, the genetic arsenal of four families. One big crash and the entire neighborhood would have had funeral scheduling issues. Not that it was a joking matter, of course. Frances just had these thoughts, what could you do? Rather than fight them and run the risk that they’d deepen her wrinkles, she just let the buggers run.

  She’d been doing this carpool for too long, she thought. It probably wasn’t a good sign that a car crash sounded like just one of several options, rather than something to be avoided. But honestly, how many times could you break up a fight over the CD player, or who had to sit in the middle, or whether they could watch a DVD, which they couldn’t—and never could have, even before the in-car machine broke. When it was a full house, like this morning, it got so raucous that a tribe of howler monkeys would have fallen silent in awed appreciation. Mind you, these were professional children, the offspring of creative people and deep thinkers, who’d marveled over them as babies, encouraged them to express themselves as toddlers, and wished they’d been more consistent and mean to them now that they were old enough to sass back.

  In the far backseat she had the two sibling children of her neighbors Anne and Charlie Porter: Kate and Theo. Lovely names, less-than-lovely children. Kate, six, specialized in the surprise attack, and often sat silently through the entire trip, rousing herself only to shove her brother viciously out of the van at the other end. Theo, ten, never saw it coming. It wasn’t that he was thick, per se, it was just that he never saw it coming. Theo himself preferred a full-frontal physical assault, with optional screaming in the ears. God knew how that dynamic would play out in therapy.

  Interleaved between them, like two all-beef patties, were her son, Milo, who was ten, and his cousin Wyatt, who was six. They weren’t really cousins, they were second cousins, or cousins once removed, or something. Wyatt’s mother was Iris, who was actually Frances’s cousin, but it was just easier to call the kids cousins and have done with it. Wyatt reveled in the riches of two mothers—his other one was an actress famous for being America’s Honey. It wasn’t a secret she was gay, it was just that America apparently didn’t give a shit.

  Right behind her—where she could reach back and hand them stuff at the traffic lights, which she often did—were her youngest child, Lally, and her neighbor Bill’s son, Lucas, both of whom were four. It was a complicated carpool that had evolved over time. At first the various parents had tried to take turns driving, but as Frances had a kid at every school, it quickly became clear it was just easier if she did it. She preferred it; she was the only parent who wasn’t “working” (let’s not get into the atom splitting of who’s doing more work, stay-at-home parents or not; let’s just agree it’s a shit show for all of us, and move on), so she wasn’t trying to get anywhere herself, and often did the driving in pajamas. She also hated the feeling in the house just after the kids had screamed and yelled their way through getting ready—finding shoes and losing shoes, hunting down books and bags and hats and whatever, all of which they could have gotten ready the night before, not that she was making a point or anything—and had scrambled through the door and down the path to someone else’s car . . . It made her feel like she’d been picked last for a team, or left behind at a train station, or like when she’d come home to an empty house after her own days at school. I want to go, too, her inner child cried, and her outer adult volunteered to do all the driving and everyone was happy.

  The elementary kids got dropped off first, then Ava at her school, and then finally Lally and Lucas at the preschool, where they needed to be physically signed in. She would read a story, maybe two, then pause at the kissing window for a proper goodbye with optional pretending she couldn’t see her kid . . . “Where’s Lally? Oh, there she is!” Jesus, did they ever get tired of that? Then she was free. Free to go to the store. Free to go home. Free to drive headfirst into the nearest wall, which was what she might have done, if she didn’t have to go back in three hours and pick up Lucas and Lally. Frances wondered how many other people were overwhelmed by anticlimax but kept plodding along, taking care of their kids, picking up juice-box straws so animals wouldn’t choke on them, collecting corks or buttons or whatever craft supply was needed, replacing the batteries in the smoke alarm as soon as the first ping of complaint was registered. Maybe this was what they meant by staying together for the children. It had nothing to do with marriage at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  Frances pulled into the elementary school lot and Ava got out, sighing as if she were a fourteen-year-old Victorian child disembarking for her day down the mine. She pulled open the door and swung her arm wide.

  “Medium-size children may now escape. Mind the gap, and watch out for speeding moms on cell phones.”

  The children had already unbuckled a
nd piled out, high-fiving Ava as they passed her. Kate stopped, and Frances turned to see what was up. The little girl’s face was a study in conflict.

  “What’s wrong, honey?”

  Kate looked at Frances, and her chin wobbled.

  “I left my toilet roll tubes at home.”

  “Oh.” Frances looked at her eldest child. Ava shrugged, looking back inside the open minivan.

  “They aren’t in the car.”

  “Oh, OK.” Frances smiled at Kate. “I’m sure the teacher will have lots of extras.” She herself had, over time, sent in three thousand toilet roll tubes. For all she knew they were building a particle collider out of them, or an accurate re-creation of the New York subway system. Let’s hope they didn’t use the obvious choice for subway trains.

  “No, I have to have my own ones.” Kate’s eyes were filling with tears, her shit-fit indicator was dropping to DEFCON 3. “It’s for the class project. Everyone else will have them.”

  Frances weighed her options. On the one hand Kate was only six, and would not only survive but would forget the trauma of not having had toilet roll tubes. But on the other hand, she was a member of the yakuza-esque organization known as Miss Lollio’s First Grade Class, whose members fell on the weakest like wolves on a lamb. Forgetting to bring toilet roll tubes and having to borrow some was a Noticeable Event to be avoided at all costs. It wasn’t on the level of peeing oneself, of course, it wasn’t going to give rise to a nickname you couldn’t shake until college, but it wasn’t great.

  “My mommy put them in a bag, but she forgot to give them to me.” A note of accusatory steel had entered her voice. Frances gazed at the little angel, whose mother had been heard calling her Butterblossom. Kate’s eyes had gone flat like a shark’s. She knew she would get what she wanted, the only question was when. I am younger than you, old lady, her eyes said, and I will stand here until age makes you infirm, at which time I will push you down, crunch over your brittle bones, and get the toilet roll tubes I need.