Dreams Are Not Enough Read Free Page A

The cousins, therefore, belonged to the top, upper middle and bottom of an industry with a well-defined hierarchy. This had not prevented the friendship forged between them in early childhood from binding them yet closer during adolescence and adulthood.
    PD’s button-down shirt collar had wilted into shapelessness and ^“gG globules of sweat showed on his face. The fresh handkerchief he took out to mop his classically handsome features was impeccably ironed:
    his mother, Lily Zaffarano, nee Lily Cordiner, had a live-in maid and cook as well as a laundress who came in on Tuesdays to iron the voluminously skirted little dresses and petticoats other daughters, Annette and Deirdre, but she personally attended to her husband and son’s linens. Frank Zaffarano, who had left the hilltop town of Enna in Sicily at sixteen, kept the old Italian belief that a woman’s purpose in life is to serve the men of the household.
    Hap and Maxim appeared less uncomfortable, though the blue of Hap’s sport shirt had a growing splotch between his broad shoulders.
    The brothers were both six foot three, but here the similarities ended.
    Hap, the older by thirteen months, was large-boned. He had thoughtful gray eyes, a wide forehead and a nose that once had been broken during football practice, leaving him with a rugged look.
    Maxim spotted a sheet of old newspaper on the floor and he retrieved it. As he fanned himself, his narrow, well-shaped lips curled down in an acid smile. He had inherited a smaller, handsome version of his father’s thin scimitar of a nose; his attenuated height was elegant.
    Women fell all over him—among the Cordiners, he had the reputation of being a cocks man
    Beth alone seemed cool, until you noticed the moistness where her silky brown page boy curled toward her throat. Her delicate, unflushed face was lightly tanned as were the round arms bared by the sleeveless, powder-blue chemise that she wore with a strand of small cultured pearls. With her slightly too-thick legs tucked under the pew, she was the ultimate California coed.
    She showed none of the inner anguish that she felt as her twin was severed from her and joined in wedlock to this cheap-looking girl, a girl whom Beth had not known existed until five thirty this morning when Barry had tapped on her window, whispering that she should dress and come to Las Vegas for his wedding.
    “Beth, no noise,” he had warned through the window screen.
    “I don’t want Mom and Dad in on this.”
    Beth had a far more deeply ingrained sense of responsibility than her twin. As she sat on the hard wooden bench she was thinking up ways to ease the blow for their mother, who suffered from a coronary condition.
    The justice of the peace was inquiring in an orotund tone, “Do you, Barry, take Alee-sha to be your lawfully wedded wife to cherish and protect?”
    “I d-do,” Barry stammered.
    “And do you, Alee-sha, take Barry here to be your lawfully married husband and promise to honor and obey him?”
    Alicia murmured assent.
    The justice said that by the power vested in him by the state of Nevada they were man and wife.
    Alicia turned. Her lashes fluttered as Barry bent for the traditional kiss.
    The justice of the peace clomped over to lean on the front pew, assailing PD, who was closest to the aisle, with odors of rancid sweat and raw onion.
    “Can I bother you and the little lady here to be witnesses for the happy couple?”
    “Come on, Bethie,” PD said.
    Now a faint flush did show on Beth’s smooth throat. Nobody, not even Barry, who was closest to her in this world, was aware that she was mad for PD. Her greatest childhood treat had been to stay overnight at Aunt Lily and Uncle Frank’s house, occupying the small room adjacent to PD’s. Her adoration had turned distinctly physical during her eleventh year, when she had simultaneously attained her menarche and learned about the Italian renaissance. In her secret thoughts she called PD by his baptismal name,