Housebreaking - Softcover

Hubbard, Colleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593337026 ISBN 13: 9780593337028

Verlag: Berkley Books, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Following a long-standing feud and looking to settle the score, a woman decides to dismantle her home—alone and by hand—and move it across a frozen pond during a harsh New England winter in this mesmerizing debut.

Home is certainly not where Del’s heart is. After a local scandal led to her parents’ divorce and the rest of her family turned their backs on her, Del left her small town and cut off contact.

Now, with both of her parents gone, a chance has arrived for Del to retaliate.

Her uncle wants the one thing Del inherited: the family home.

Instead of handing the place over, and with no other resources at her disposal, Del decides she will tear the place apart herself—piece by piece.

But Del will soon discover, the task stirs up more than just old memories as relatives—each in their own state of unraveling—come knocking on her door.

This spare, strange, magical book is a story not only about the powerlessness and hurt that run through a family but also about the moments when brokenness can offer us the rare chance to start again.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A native of New England, Colleen Hubbard now lives in the U.K. with her family. She wrote her debut novel, Housebreaking, while on maternity leave from her job with the NHS. She graduated from the University of East Anglia's MA program in creative writing, where she earned the Head of School Prize with a distinction.
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

 

On an unseasonably warm afternoon in late September, Del did something that she could not explain to herself and would not explain to others. In the months to come, when she considered the moment that changed everything, she would reach no conclusion as to why she did what she did. In the short term, it was stupid; but in the long term, it was nothing less than catastrophic.

 

The cleaning of South Elm started as it normally did. Del picked up the keys from the agency and checked the paperwork to see if there were any add-ons. Sometimes the owner wanted the fridge cleaned or the oven scoured. Other cleaners wouldn't do that sort of filthy work and tried to trade jobs, but Del didn't mind. She got paid fifteen dollars out of the agency's fifty-dollar fee for extras. On this occasion, a note indicated that she needed to change the sheets in the top-floor guest suite.

 

South Elm was fairly straightforward. She had cleaned it twice a week for more than a year without ever meeting the occupants, but she knew them from her intimate involvement with their stuff. The owner was a single mother with twin boys and, judging from her Japanese knife collection and elaborate home cinema, a serious amount of cash. They lived in a five-bedroom brick town house overlooking a small gated park.

 

As Del let herself into the house and went to the cleaning cabinet in the kitchen, she thought that the owner's man must be coming. She wasn't sure who he was, or the nature of his relationship to the homeowner or her sons, but she had picked up enough details to piece together the scenario. He visited every other month or so. Del was always asked to set up the guest bedroom for him, perhaps for propriety's sake, but at some point, he ended up in the owner's bed. His sheets were mussed but didn't have the stink of having been slept in overnight, and Del had found his plaid boxers bunched at the foot of the owner's bed.

 

Del took the bucket and cloths out of the cabinet and then removed the cleaning solutions and spray bottles from the drawer beneath the kitchen sink.

 

She started with a spritz around the living/dining area, which opened to a huge bay window that overlooked the park. Walking around in her socks on the wide-planked walnut floor, she wiped down Lucite chairs, straightened the photos on the mantel, and made sure that a pebbled glass whiskey decanter was centered on its platter. Then she started to clean the floor. Plunge, wring, mop, repeat. She liked this type of work because it allowed her mind to drift. Del thought about Night Must Fall, which she had watched on TV last night with her roommate, and wondered if they would get pizza for dinner. She moved to the kitchen to get to the good stuff, like the greasy stove hood filter. Putting on gloves, she filled the sink with Palmolive and hot water.

 

Later, with an hour left of the clean, Del leaned the mop against the wall on the third floor, across from the children's skylighted playroom, and felt a drop of perspiration roll from her throat down to her bra. Her chapped hands burned from being soaked in cleaning fluids. It was late afternoon, and the sun shot like a dart through the blinds at the end of the hallway and went directly into her skull. The turbo vacuum cleaner still roared in her ears though she had unplugged it at least twenty minutes earlier. And that was when Del did something she had never done before: she went through the house room by room, touching the owner's belongings as if they were hers. The silky pearl nightgowns that Del herself had tucked into the marble-handled chest of drawers, a toy aircraft carrier with guns that popped, a small gold compact that clicked open to reveal a cake of raspberry gloss. She touched her fingertip to the gloss, felt it melt to a semiliquid state, and pressed it to her lips. Then she turned on the tap, took off her clothes, and got in the tub.

 

Del wasn't cleaning the tub: she had done that already. She was submerging herself, a boiled lobster color to her skin. Just as she reached for the cork-topped glass container of bath salts, a woman with straight black hair appeared in the bathroom door, a crumpled paper grocery bag under one arm. The green tops of carrots hung limply from the bag.

 

Del expected screaming. It was the owner of the house, and she had never seen her cleaner before. But she didn't scream. She simply put down her bag, threw over a towel, and watched as Del put on her bleach-stained jeans and loose gray T-shirt. The woman was wearing a crisp white lab coat with her name stitched in blue above where her heart must be. Del had laundered that coat before. It had to be washed with like colors.

 

In silence they walked through the long white hallway and down the stairs, where Del slipped on her shoes and went to the door. She wanted to apologize, but the words didn't come. Shame pulsed through her body. The woman in the lab coat stood at the top of the brownstone steps and watched as Del retreated to her bus stop.

 

By the time Del got to the agency to drop off the keys, there was already an envelope on the desk with her name on it. It was her final paycheck with a yellow Post-it Note stuck to it.

 

On the Post-it Note were two words handwritten in black ink.

 

Get lost.

 

Chapter Two

 

There were several reasons Del did not plan to share the change in her employment status with her roommate, Tym. She needed to think through how she'd cover up her mistake.

 

Del and Tym had made a deal that her dirt-cheap rent was contingent on maintaining steady employment. There was no way she could afford to live anywhere else. Also, she was certain that she could find another job before he even noticed that she was around the apartment at unusual hours, such as all day long every day of the week.

 

Four years ago, on her twentieth birthday, Tym had brought a box of supermarket cupcakes to the apartment Del had shared with her father. Her father, Stan, had died several weeks earlier, and she had not been able to keep up with the rent. She had no experience with eviction and wasn't sure how quickly it would happen, so she had simply stayed inside the apartment, eating through her father's collection of spicy ramen, waiting for an authority figure to show up and kick her out.

 

By the time Tym arrived to check in on her, the utilities had shut off one by one. She was living in the dark, ignoring the huge pile of mail by the door.

 

Among her father's friends, she was well known for skipping out on jobs. It had become a joke. Since she moved in with her dad at age seventeen, she had worked at a restaurant, a cafŽ, a video rental place, and several temp agencies. Her longest stint had been a six-month placement at a dentist's office. She had liked that job: the dentist gave her a year's supply of toothpaste, and she always got to leave at exactly 4:30 p.m. But she got bored and irritated with the regularity of it, and one day she had simply stopped going in.

 

Tym had known the whole story, and so when he told her in her father's dark apartment that she could come and live in the spare room of his place, he stressed that she would need to get a job and keep it. He wasn't a charity worker, and she wasn't a strong candidate for late adoption. She would need to behave like an adult. She agreed and went on various long-term placements for a temp agency before being hired as a cleaner.

 

Being a cleaner didn't appeal to a deeper calling, but what did? Not the dentist's office. Not the video rental place, either. She had worked steadily since she was thirteen, when she earned a paycheck at...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berkley Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593337026
• ISBN 13: 9780593337028
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 344
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland