The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik
I looked in the bakery section.
“Joe?” whispered Jenny, coming toward me in the dark. She sat on my lap and the swivel chair creaked as it swayed. She put a hand to my face. “Why are you crying, honey?”
“Was I?” I said, feeling like an idiot as I sniffed and wiped my eyes with my fingers.
Jenny kissed me.
“It’s the best birthday I ever had.”
I nodded and we both sat for a moment, looking out the window.
“I love the view from up here,” said Jenny. “Look, Conor’s filling his pockets with candy!”
“Our modern-day Mr. Snowbeck,” I said of our departed Twinkies shoplifter. I cleared my throat. “Do you know what else I was looking at?”
Jenny shook her head.
“I was looking at the bakery section, remembering the day you came in and you won the apple pie.”
“You rigged the contest.”
“Damn straight.”
“I’m sure glad.” She straightened her back. “Hey, Nick’s getting back on the stage.”
“We should go down and hear him,” I said, but neither one of us moved.
The party, with its laughs and music and chatter, continued down below us, but for me, the party was holding my fifty-year-old wife in my arms, breathing in the smell of her fifty-year-old hair, her fifty-year-old skin.
“Joe,” she said, “you’re crying again.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s just—well, I never could have imagined…all this. All this life. Everything I see out this window.” She sat quietly in my arms, nodding as I added, “Our view from Mount Joy.”
About the Author
LORNA LANDVIK is the bestselling author of Patty Jane’s House of Curl, Your Oasis on Flame Lake, The Tall Pine Polka, Welcome to the Great Mysterious, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, and Oh My Stars. Married and the mother of two daughters, she is also an actor, playwright, and dog park attendee with the handsome Julio.
Also by Lorna Landvik
Oh My Stars
Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
Welcome to the Great Mysterious
The Tall Pine Polka
Your Oasis on Flame Lake
Patty Jane’s House of Curl
The View from Mount Joy is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Lorna Landvik
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-50228-5
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Lorna Landvik, The View from Mount Joy