Ruby Read Free Page A

“Brown is brown. Besides which, I brought you a black hat to wear and you can’t wear black and brown together.”
    “You can now,” Winnie said. “It’s okay. You can even wear navy and black together.”
    “Oh, sure,” Olivia said. “What are you going to tell me next? That you can wear white shoes after Labor Day?”
    She shifted Arthur’s case to her other arm. Inside, he meowed at her, angry. Arthur hated his case and would hate to put on his little cat top hat that she forced him into on every holiday and special occasion.
    “Oh, good,” David said. “There’s Rex.”
    Rex, his best friend and today’s best man, loped toward them, unshaven and still with bed hair.
    “Couldn’t you at least comb your hair?” Olivia said. She spit on her fingertips and reached for Rex, who backed away from her. Now that she knew she was doing exactly the right thing, Olivia wanted everything to be perfect.
    “No way,” Rex said. “I don’t even let my mother do that.”
    David slapped him on the back, all male and happy. “Hey, man.”
    “Hey, man,” Rex said.
    Olivia and Winnie rolled their eyes at each other.
    Three years earlier, Rex and David had both moved to New York from California. Olivia loved the way they said they were from “the Bay Area,” the way they called beer “suds,” the way they searched the city for a good burrito. Thinking of all these things made her remember to be happy: she was marrying David. She put down Arthur’s case and moved into David’s arms.
    Rex was talking about the new play he was working on. He did the lights for theater and, once, for Barney’s Christmas windows.
    “Don’t talk about work on our wedding day,” Olivia told him.
    “No, no, no,” Rex said. “I’m talking about love.”
    “Who’s the lucky one this time?” Olivia said. She had wanted Rex to fall in love with Winnie, but now she knew better. Rex fell in and out of love with each new show.
    “Get this,” Rex said. “Her name is Magnolia. For real. Her mother loved magnolia trees.”
    Olivia tried to count the people in front of them in line. Since everyone brought witnesses and even entire families with them, it was difficult to tell how many people were actually ahead of them. A group of bikers. A very pregnant woman with a sullen guy. Two women dressed in extravagant wedding gowns. A Chinese family. A Spanish family. Then them. She smiled. They would be married in no time.
    David’s voice drifted above her. He was talking about work. He was an industrial designer, and right now he was talking about stainless steel. Olivia tilted her head back and watched his chin move. She hadn’t really studied him from this angle and she kind of liked it. She was short enough and he was tall enough that when she looked at him like this, he looked oddly elongated, like someone in a fun-house mirror. She could see a small spot on his chin that he had missed when he’d shaved. His curly hair reminded her of a topiary and his nose looked bigger than it really was. Although he did have a good-sized nose, a Roman nose, even though he wasn’t Italian at all.
    She was Italian. Exactly half. But except for her hair—also brown and curly, although she used an eggplant rinse on it—she did not look at all Italian. Her eyes were blue and she had such fair skin that she always wore a hat in the sun, which, of course, she enjoyed doing, large straw ones with wide brims and fake fruit or flowers on them.
    “We really should buy that house at the beach,” she said. On their last excursion up to Rhode Island, they had fallen in love with a run-down purple house. For weeks, they’d been debating whether or not to buy it. It needed work. It needed furniture. Whole sets of things: dishes, utensils, towels, pans. All of it felt so big and grown-up to Olivia.
    “I would love to buy it,” David said.
    He’d been saying that all along. Like getting married, Olivia realized, they would probably end up doing what he