Another eye roll.
Barry gave Rachael a disconcerting look. “What, I’m not hep enough for you?”
“It’s ‘hip,’ Barry.”
“Shot down again.”
Rachael left the porch shaking her head and muttering, “This is crazy.”
“What are you serving, Olivia?” Marie asked.
“Ice cream.”
“That’s nice. What flavor?”
“Pokeydoke.”
“What flavor, sweetie?”
“She said pistachio, Mom…I mean Marie,” Rachael shouted from the other room.
Olivia looked at Marie with wide eyes. “I knowed that.”
“Hey, Marie. Where’s the chocolate sauce?”
Olivia’s face lit up. She stopped what she was doing and headed toward the kitchen and Rachael.
“For what?” Marie asked.
“To put on the cake. I didn’t tell Barry, but I forgot to put the eggs in the mix, and it’s awfully dry.”
The four grownups watched a giggling Olivia, whose face was sticky with chocolate sauce, run from Rachael, who chased her with a wet paper towel.
Maurice looked at Karen. Karen looked at Marie. “Is this what we have to look forward to?” she asked her.
Marie smiled at Barry and then Maurice and Karen. “I sure hope so.”
THE END
Don’t miss Florence Osmund’s first novel, The Coach House, prequel to Daughters.
It’s 1945 Chicago. Anything can happen, and for Richard Marchetti, it usually does.
Marie Marchetti, however, doesn’t know that about her husband. To her, they have the perfect life together. That is, until little things start to pop up that put her on alert: late night phone calls, cryptic receipts hidden in the basement, and a gun in his desk drawer. When she learns he’s secretly attended a mobster’s funeral, her feelings are confirmed. And when she inadvertently interrupts a meeting between Richard and his so-called business associates, he causes her to fall down the basement steps, compelling Marie to run for her life.
Ending up in Atchison, Kansas, Marie quickly sets up a new life for herself. She meets Karen Franklin, a woman who will become her lifelong best friend, and rents a coach house apartment behind a three-story Victorian home. But her attempts at a new life are fraught with the fear that Richard will show up at any time—and who knows what he or his associates will do then? Ironically, it is the discovery of the identity of her real father and his ethnicity that unexpectedly changes her life forever.
What they’re saying about The Coach House…
“The settings in The Coach House are described beautifully by Florence Osmund—Chicago and its music venues, New York City, and San Francisco—we get to travel and enjoy these cities with Marie.
“The character development is Osmund’s strength in The Coach House. Each character becomes alive in chapter after chapter. It’s hard to put down the book because we get so absorbed with each character—whether it’s Marie, Richard, and Karen, or Richard’s cohort doing his dirty work.
“The Coach House is a superbly written book, in my opinion. It will leave the reader thinking about relationships, adversity, independence and growth, and prejudices. It’s always nice to finish a good book with something to think about.”
—Author and book reviewer, Mary Crocco
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Florence Osmund grew up in a Victorian home in Libertyville, Illinois, complete with a coach house, the same house she used as inspiration for her first novel, The Coach House, and its sequel, Daughters. She earned her master’s from the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and has more than three decades of experience in corporate America. Osmund currently resides in Chicago, where she continues to write novels.
Visit her website at http://www.florenceosmund.com, and follow her blog at http://www.florenceosmundbooks.wordpress.com.
Daughters Page 32