A Big Storm Knocked It Over Read Free Page B

few minutes to get acclimated. Although they had shared this apartment for a year, in some ways she was still not used to it. She had never lived with anyone before, and the fact that she shared this dwelling with a man amazed her.
    The kitchen was as they had left it, the coffee cups washed and set neatly on a tea towel. She and Teddy were both neat: Jane Louise had the tidy habits of a designer whose tools are always clean and put away in the right place. Teddy was a plant chemist. His firm invented nonpoisonous alternatives to such toxic products as pesticides and household products. His mind was orderly, and order banished bad, chaotic thoughts.
    The household they had created in their own image was more bare than cluttered. The couch, which they both loved, was elegant and uncomfortable. It had belonged to Teddy’s grandmotherand was made of mahogany in the Empire style. When Teddy inherited it it had been covered with crumbling black horsehair, and Jane Louise had had it recovered in green-and-yellow stripes. She loved it because it was beautiful, and Teddy loved it because it rooted him in his history.
    There were times when Jane Louise was quite enraptured by that history, at least on Teddy’s mother’s side—generation after generation of stable New Englanders. She herself had been dragged around as a child and could never really say she was from anywhere, whereas Teddy had grown up in the country, in the house his mother had inherited from her mother. His best friend, Peter Peering, had been his friend since he was born. Otherwise Teddy’s life had been something of a mess. His parents had been bitterly divorced when he was three and had never had a kind word for each other since.
    The least happy part of planning the wedding had been the contemplation of Teddy’s parents in the same room. After all these years they still hated each other, and Eleanor loathed Cornelius’s second wife, Martine. But in the end they had stayed in separate corners, and Edie and Mokie had served as runners between them, making sure everyone was calm.
    Teddy’s father was a Brit, with a stiff white mustache and the bearing of a naval man. He had been in the British navy during the war and had spent the years after it doing something for a company his family had long had an interest in. Later he became a wine merchant, which he was quite good at, and had married Martine, a big, soft woman from Bermuda who had produced Teddy’s three half-sisters.
    Once upon a time Teddy’s parents had had a wedding and thought they might be happy. Teddy had a photo of this event: Eleanor, looking the same, except younger and interested in looking pretty, and Cornelius, in his dress uniform, looking as if hisonly interest were in having his photo taken. In spite of his fractured boyhood, Teddy had turned out to be level and even tempered, even if he was not an easy read.
    What was it about marriage, Jane Louise wondered, sitting down on the couch’s hard, striped, unavailable surface, that made it seem so strange to her? It was not a bit strange to Adele and Phil-the-Fiancé. They were schooling themselves in it, buying towels and hampers, shopping for china patterns, and saving their money in a joint account. Adele and Phil had known each other for ten years, since they were babies.
    Whereas, Jane Louise reflected, she and Teddy were barely acquainted. They had met two years ago, courted for one year, lived together for another, and here they were, virtual strangers in each other’s lives, married forever.
    Suddenly Jane Louise was very tired. She grabbed a pillow off the chair, stuck it underneath her head, and closed her eyes, wondering about her own parents.
    Her mother, Lilly, had remarried after Jane Louise’s father, Francis, had died. She was happily married now in a way she had never been happily married to Jane Louise’s father, who was charming but never made enough money, and to whom the