Love Always Read Free Page A

realized was probably the correct thing: a childless marriage. This was also complicatedby the fact that her husband’s sister, a volunteer worker at the hospital who had always envied her sister-in-law and who had had a brief affair with the same doctor, was now considering blackmail, wanting to force her sister-in-law into the dull routine of motherhood with the wrong man, so that she could make the handsome doctor who would be left behind fall in love with her again. The further complication was that when his wife’s wealthy benefactor died, the wimpy husband had buckled down long enough to put his wife through the last two years of medical school. The day of her graduation, he had had a mental breakdown and, when he was recovering, a brief affair with a woman who worked in the lab. Then he had at last gotten an advance for his book,
Barren, a
fictionalized account of his and his wife’s failure to have children. What no one but the doctor/lover knew was that Stephanie Sykes was pregnant and begging the doctor to abort her. What even the doctor did not realize was that his lover’s husband’s ex-lover, the woman who worked in the lab, had found out that Stephanie was pregnant. She was anti-abortion, and if the doctor performed the surgery, she was going to go to the wimpy novelist and let him know what a farce his happy family life was, in hopes of getting him herself.
    “Nicole needs a vacation. I want to send her to you,” Jane said.
    “She’d be bored to death,” Lucy said. “You know what happens here? In the late afternoon the cows walk into the field.”
    “Boredom might be good for her,” Jane said. “Don’t people develop their imaginations if they’re bored?”
    Why argue? Lucy thought. If Jane had made up her mind, the visit from Nicole was a
fait accompli
. Only seconds elapsed before Jane’s ideas materialized. Their mother likened Jane’s mind to a dollop of pancake batter dropped on a hot griddle.
    “Both of you come, and we’ll go to Philadelphia and visit Mother,” Lucy said.
    “I’m going to tell you something that you can never tell another soul,” Jane said. “I’ve gained eight pounds since you lastsaw me. I’m on a macrobiotic regime. I have to stay close to the seaweed store. I’ll come visit when I’ve finished ingesting half of the ocean.”
    “Does Nicole want to come?” Lucy said.
    “She loves you,” Jane said. “She had such a good time the last time she visited. She still talks about Heath Bar Crunch ice cream and Hildon’s motorcycle.”
    “He sold it,” Lucy said.
    He had sold his motorcycle because he wanted a pickup instead, but so far he hadn’t found one with the right ambience.
    “Come on,” Jane said. “Martyr yourself.”
    Lucy laughed. She spent no more time than other people thinking about being a do-gooder. Like the rest of the world, she was preoccupied and imperfect: she had had an abortion, crushed a few rabbits under tires as she rolled down country roads, turned the page of the magazine when her eye met the eyes of the orphan she could save if she made out a check and sent it before the winds of fate blew the urchin’s last grain of rice away.
    Take Nicole for the summer? To Lucy, she was still a baby—the poor baby whose father had died before he ever saw her, two months after he and Jane married, off the southernmost point of the United States, in Key West, after drinking ten piña coladas with friends. After Nicole had been born, Jane had gotten engaged again, to an actor. They broke it off when Jane had a miscarriage, but before they did, he arranged for Nicole to meet his agent. Just after her first birthday, Nicole had done a toy ad, hugging a Baby Do-Right doll against her cheek, and the rest was history. From the first, she had not just been personable in front of the camera. Other children had rashes and insect bites, but Nicole’s skin was unblemished; she always looked windswept rather than rumpled. She was the perfect