Excerpt from THE HOUSE OF CAVANAUGH by Polly Dugan
Hutch walks out of Julia’s yard, crosses the driveway, opens the gate to Carolyn and Palmer’s yard, shuts it behind him and walks into the house. Inside the back door is a mudroom and through that, the kitchen, connected to a family room off to the side. He finds the soy sauce where Julia said it would be, but instead of leaving, Hutch walks into the dining room.
The dining room table is covered with a sewing project: a state-of-the-art machine, folded yards of fabric, cut quilt blocks—some in stacked piles, some already sewn together. From the look of the patterns, pastel blue Winnie-the-Pooh, and white polka dots on a yellow background, Hutch guesses Carolyn is working on a baby quilt.
By now he’s almost in the living room. He walks toward the mantel to look at the photographs lined up there. In an ornate silver frame is a photo of Carolyn and Palmer on their wedding day and several pictures of their two sons at various ages in different sized frames. Hutch passes the fireplace to get a better look at the photos at the far end of the mantel.
When Hutch sees the photograph of Joan on her wedding day, he has to reach out and steady himself on the arm of the chair behind him. It’s the same picture he had seen in her and Graham’s apartment fifty years earlier.
He stands staring at the photo, hanging onto the chair, then he lets go of the chair and walks to the mantel. He picks up the frame and sits down in the same chair which had just steadied him. He gazes at the face he’d known so well.
“Hello?” Hutch is startled by a voice behind him.
He turns around, the frame in his hands, and there’s Carolyn’s other son at the foot of the stairs.
“Oh, hello there,” Hutch says. “I’m Julia’s dad. I’m Hutch.”
“I’m Brett,” he says. He looks to be around ten or eleven.
“Well, hello, Brett, it’s nice to meet you. I’m very sorry,” Hutch says. What else can he say? He stands up and returns the picture to the mantel. “Julia sent me over here to get soy sauce—” he points to where he’d set it down on the dining room table, near the quilt project, as if it’s to blame for his prowling.
“There it is, over there, and your folks have such a nice house I just started snooping around. I saw your mom’s sewing, and then I just started looking at all these great pictures of your family.”
“It’s cool,” Brett says. “I like to check out people’s houses, too. One of my friend’s houses has a bidet in one of their bathrooms. It was already there when they moved in. It’s super weird.”
Hutch doesn’t plan to say any more than is necessary, but caught, he feels like he has to do something, so off he goes, before he can even stop himself.
“Who is this?” he points to the frame he’d just put back.
“My grandmother Joan,” Brett says. “My mom’s mom. She died when my mom was in college. We visit her grave when we go to New York. That’s where my grandparents lived. My grandfather still does.”
“Oh, I see,” Hutch says. He stares at the frame. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“How come you were holding it?”
He scrambles to answer the kid’s question, which has taken longer than Hutch thought it would for him to ask.
“Well, like I said, I was admiring your family’s photos. I was being nosy; I really am sorry. And when I saw this picture, it reminded me of someone I knew years ago. But after I had a closer look, I see it’s not the person I was thinking of.” Hutch laughs as he tries to make his words convincing. “Supposedly we all have a twin out there somewhere, right?”
He walks away from the mantel, and Brett, and toward the soy sauce on the dining room table, which seems much farther away than it is.
“I should head back next door,” Hutch says. “Julia’s in the middle of cooking.”
“That would be pretty wild,” Brett says. “If you’d known my grandmother.”
Hutch retrieves the soy sauce and continues into the kitchen, making for the back door. Just put one foot in front of the other, he thinks. Christ.
Brett follows him and gets a glass from the cabinet next to the sink. Hutch stops when he gets to the back door and turns around. He wants to ask Brett to not rat him out, but that would call more attention to what he’d caught Hutch doing, so he goes with another tack.
“I’m sorry you never knew your grandmother,” Hutch says. “I was good friends with my grandmother, and I like being a friend to my grandsons.”
His playing at lightheartedness is taking more energy than Hutch expected. He feels like he needs to lie down and rest.
“Yeah,” Brett says. “It’s sad. We talk about her a lot though.” He fills the glass with water from the tap. “So who was she?” he asks.
“What?” Hutch says.
“Who’s the woman you thought the picture of my grand- mother was? Was she your girlfriend?” Brett says.
The cordless landline on the counter rings and Brett peers at the caller ID. He thumbs toward Julia’s house. “They prob- ably wonder what happened to you,” he says. He picks up the phone, presses a button and holds it to his ear. “Hello,” and after a few seconds, “Yeah, he’s here, he’s on his way back now. Yeah, I’ll be over in a minute. Okay, bye.” He pushes another button and puts the phone back on the counter. “Like I said,” Brett says.
Brett smiles at him and Hutch wonders if he recognizes, as Hutch does, the strangeness of the reversed roles they’re in: He’s the waylaid kid on an errand, his delay warranting checking on, and Brett is the trusted neighbor assuring Hutch’s family he’s heading home momentarily.
“So was she like a girlfriend?” he says.
The phone call from Julia’s house hasn’t rescued Hutch from answering. “No, not really,” he says. “I had hoped so, but things didn’t turn out that way.”
“What was her name?” Brett says.
“Sorry, Brett, I have to get back,” Hutch says. “What does it matter?”
“You could find her if you wanted to,” Brett says. “You can find practically anyone on the internet.”
Hutch draws a blank for a beat, thinks of his grand- mother and makes her the substitute.
“Margot,” he says. “Her name was Margot. That’s who I thought your grandmother was. A woman I used to know named Margot.”
“Well, if you ever want any help looking her up, let me know,” Brett says. “I helped my grandfather find some friends he went to high school with. It really blew his mind.”
“Okay, I’ll remember that. Thanks, Brett,” Hutch says. “I’ll see you later.” Because he can’t think of anything else to say or do, he raises the bottle of soy sauce in the gesture of a toast, as if it’s a meaningful prop.
“Sure, Hutch, see you later,” he says.
As Hutch walks back to Julia’s house he thinks about the irony of Brett’s offer. He wasn’t looking for Joan—he’d known for almost twenty-five years what happened to her— and yet he’d stumbled on her anyway, in the house right next to his daughter’s.
There was no way he could continue the evening they all started less than an hour ago, but that now seemed like a different time. To finish cooking with Julia and be in the same room with and talk to Carolyn is just too much. Hutch delivers the soy sauce and kisses his daughter on the fore- head and tells her he’s so sorry but he’s feeling chilled, maybe it’s a fever coming on, and he’s going to take a cab home. He barely glances at Carolyn and Palmer visiting with Alice, asks them to excuse his interruption, and tells Alice the same story, kisses her on the forehead, and announces he’s leaving. She asks if he wants her to come with him and Hutch tells her no, he doesn’t want to ruin her night, and Alice asks if he’s sure and Hutch says that yes, he is, really, and that he’ll see her at home.
Excerpted from THE HOUSE OF CAVANAUGH. Copyright ©2025 By Polly Dugan. Reprinted with permission of Sibylline Press. All rights reserved.
THE HOUSE OF CAVANAUGH by Polly Dugan
A long-buried secret. A friendship on the brink. A family forever changed.
New York City, 1964. Joan Cavanaugh—a young wife and mother yearning for more—falls into a passionate affair with Peter “Hutch” Hutchinson. When the affair ends, she returns to her marriage, raising three daughters with her devoted husband, Graham. For nearly three decades, she keeps her secret locked away, taking the truth of her daughter Anne’s paternity to her grave when she succumbs to cancer in 1989.
Portland, 2014. Carolyn Cavanaugh and Julia Hutchinson are next-door neighbors and the closest of friends. But when Carolyn’s father, Graham, visits for Thanksgiving, his path collides with Julia’s parents, Hutch and Alice. The revelation that unfolds following Graham’s trip upends both families, bringing a truth to light that will shake two families to their core.
As decades of deception unravel, bonds are tested, loyalties waver, and the meaning of family is redefined. The House of Cavanaugh is a poignant and gripping exploration of love, betrayal, and the unexpected ways secrets can bind us—or break us apart.
Saga | Women’s Fiction Friendship [Sibylline Press, On Sale: October 10, 2025, Trade Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781960573469 / eISBN: 9781960573520]
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About Polly Dugan
Polly Dugan lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a reader at Tin House magazine. A former employee of Powell’s Books, she is an alumna of the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. Dugan’s first published story, “A Matter of Time,” was Line Zero’s Spring 2012 Literary Contest Winner, “Masquerades” (as “One At a Time”), was Narrative’s Story of the Week (December 2012), and “Kitten Season” was an Honorable Mention Recipient in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers (August 2009).
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