Excerpt from The Book of George by Kate Greathead, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

THE SHOPPING PROBLEM

George, 12–18

To George's D.A.R.E. graduation in the Cochran Gym, his father wore a suit. The suit hadn't registered as embarrassing to George, who couldn't even remember what it looked like when he overheard his mother mention it to a friend on the phone later that week, but from her derisive tone in describing it—custom-made, seersucker, J. Press—he understood that there was something inherently foolish about it. Or perhaps it was his father's wearing it to such a silly occasion: George and his classmates on the bleachers singing a song about abstaining from drugs and alcohol, the culmination of the substance-abuse unit of their seventh-grade health class.

George struggled to grasp the nuances of his mother's contempt, but it was the beginning of his awareness of a problem in his parents' marriage that had to do with his father's love of expensive clothes.

Ellen didn't discuss it with her kids, but she wasn't exactly sotto voce when venting to her friends on the phone, and there were certain cutting remarks that George wished he hadn't heard. Not normal. Shopping the way a woman shops—a woman with a shopping problem.

It was hard for George to imagine his mother having any vices. Ellen, who wore very little makeup and had let her hair go gray, rolled her eyes when people referred to her as beautiful, but she maintained the body of the ballet dancer she'd been in her youth and there was an awareness of her own grace in the way she moved. Her posture could be forbidding. She had a way of silently materializing at the threshold of her children's rooms at incriminating moments, though she rarely intervened beyond expressing her opinion.

"It's just not very attractive," she'd told Cressida the first time she'd caught her smoking.

George recalled, as a young child, a tender, involved mother, but as he got older she withdrew. By the time he and Cressida were teenagers, Ellen seemed to view them as fully formed people who were going to do what they were going to do. She supported their endeavors and applauded their successes, but their accomplishments were not a particular source of pride for her. Nor was she inclined to interpret their struggles as a referendum on her mothering.

Denis had always been the more parental of the two, though between working and commuting, he was not around as much.

* * *

"Do you ever think how random it is, that Mom and Dad are married?" Cressida asked George as they rifled through a gift basket someone had sent their parents, who'd just left for JFK. It was their twentieth wedding anniversary, and they would be spending a week in London. Cressida, who was living with friends in a house upstate after finishing her first year at Bard, had come home so that George, who had just turned fourteen, wouldn't be in the house alone.

George shook his head as he examined a furry brown specimen that turned out to be a dried apricot.

"It's pretty random." Cressida used her teeth to uncork a bottle of champagne.

The sun was setting, and the kitchen was slathered in electric orange. For the third day in a row the temperature had been over ninety, and the house was ripe with the musk of heat-saturated materials, old rugs and cedar closets, Ellen's acrylics. The upholstered window seat was still warm, almost hot to the touch.

"We should go swimming in Sugar Pond," George said.

Cressida rejected the proposal with a flared nostril.

"That's disgusting," she said as he dipped a prune into a jar of olive tapenade, mistaking it for chocolate.

"It's good," George claimed, too proud to admit otherwise.

* * *

That evening, Cressida had some college friends over. Like her high school crowd, they were not friendly and dressed in mostly black. They slept over, and the following afternoon more arrived. They kept trickling in, an unsavory cast of characters who regarded George with sardonic amusement—hey, little brother—on the rare occasion they acknowledged him at all.

Excerpted from The Book of George by Kate Greathead. Copyright © 2024 by Kate Greathead. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.