Read Shine (Short Story) for Free Online Page B

Christina’s home and Dalton all at once. No matter where you stood, you’d be underneath the same light.

B Y J ODI P ICOULT
    Small Great Things
    Leaving Time
    The Storyteller
    Lone Wolf
    Sing You Home
    House Rules
    Handle with Care
    Change of Heart
    Nineteen Minutes
    The Tenth Circle
    Vanishing Acts
    My Sister’s Keeper
    Second Glance
    Perfect Match
    Salem Falls
    Plain Truth
    Keeping Faith
    The Pact
    Mercy
    Picture Perfect
    Harvesting the Heart
    Songs of the Humpback Whale
Short Stories
    Where There’s Smoke
    Larger Than Life
    Shine
For Young Adults
    Off the Page
    Between the Lines
And for the Stage
    Over the Moon: An Original Musical for Teens

About the Author
    J ODI P ICOULT is the author of twenty-three novels, including the #1
New York Times
bestsellers
Leaving Time, The Storyteller, Lone Wolf, Between the Lines, Sing You Home, House Rules, Handle with Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes,
and
My Sister’s Keeper
. She lives with her husband and three children.
    JodiPicoult.com
    Facebook.com/​JodiPicoult
    Twitter: @jodipicoult
    Instagram: @jodipicoult

If you enjoyed meeting Ruth in
Shine
…you won’t want to miss her appearance in Jodi Picoult’s new novel
Small Great Things
Coming in hardcover and ebook October 2016

Ruth
    The miracle happened on West Seventy-fourth Street, in the home where Mama worked. It was a big brownstone encircled by a wrought-iron fence, and overlooking either side of the ornate door were gargoyles, their granite faces carved from my nightmares. They terrified me, so I didn’t mind the fact that we always entered through the less-impressive side door, whose keys Mama kept on a ribbon in her purse.
    Mama had been working for Sam Hallowell and his family since before my sister and I were born. You may not have recognized his name, but you would have known him the minute he said hello. He had been the unmistakable voice in the mid-1960s who announced before every show:
The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC!
In 1976, when the miracle happened, he was the network’s head of programming. The doorbell beneath those gargoyles was the famously pitched three-note chime everyone associates with NBC. Sometimes, when I came to work with my mother, I’d sneak outside and push the button and hum along.
    The reason we were with Mama that day was because it was a snow day. School was canceled, but we were too little to stay alone in our apartment while Mama went to work—which she did, through snow and sleet and probably also earthquakes and Armageddon. She muttered, stuffing us into our snowsuits and boots, that it didn’t matter if she had to cross a blizzard to do it, but God forbid Ms. Mina had to spread the peanut butter on her own sandwich bread. In fact the only time I remember Mama taking time off work was twenty-five years later, when she had a double hip replacement, generously paid for by the Hallowells. She stayed home for a week, and even after that, when it didn’t quite heal right and she insisted on returning to work, Mina found her tasks to do that kept her off her feet. But when I was little, during school vacations and bouts of fever and snow days like this one, Mama would take us with her on the B train downtown.
    Mr. Hallowell was away in California that week, which happened often, and which meant that Ms. Mina and Christina needed Mama even more. So did Rachel and I, but we were better at taking care of ourselves, I suppose, than Ms. Mina was.
    When we finally emerged at Seventy-second Street, the world was white. It was not just that Central Park was caught in a snow globe. The faces of the men and women shuddering through the storm to get to work looked nothing like mine, or like my cousins’ or neighbors’.
    I had not been into any Manhattan homes except for the Hallowells’, so I didn’t know how extraordinary it was for one family to live, alone, in this huge building. But I remember thinking it made no sense that Rachel and I had to