The Garden Path Read Free

proximity on line, in a waiting room, at a restaurant. What then? Rosie’s mind numbed and went blank, and she shivered. The fire failed to warm her.
    â€œKnowing Susannah, she’ll be going down to McDonald’s for her lunch break,” Peter said. “I don’t see her going the bean curd route. Though I suppose California could do it to anyone.”
    â€œI’m sure I won’t run into them.”
    â€œThey just might look you up.”
    â€œShe wouldn’t have the nerve.”
    â€œDon’t underestimate her.”
    Florida, Rosie thought desperately, hugging her tea mug with cold hands. Her pulse pounded in her ear like the surf. It was true—Susannah had the nerve of a pelican. Just because her mother had slapped her and insulted her and cursed her in public, it didn’t mean she would stop trying. Edwin, never very generous anyway, was, last anyone had heard, in Mexico with his new popsie, who was younger than his daughter. And not too long ago, People magazine had spilled the beans about what kind of money Rosie was making from her television show. She should have expected to hear from Susannah.
    â€œWell, they won’t be here until spring,” Peter said. “And who knows if it’ll come off, anyway? I don’t get the impression she and Dmitri are the world’s most stable individuals.”
    â€œIvan,” she said, trying to remember what her son-in-law, the expriest turned painter, looked like. Ivan Cord, his name was—short for something unpronounceably Slavic, probably. She had seen him just once, and she had a vague recollection of a large and hairy man with a pale, sullen face and thick lips. “He looks like something from a monster movie, if I recall,” she said to Peter. “ The Creature from the Black Lagoon , or White Pongo . I’m sure he’s some kind of an addict.”
    â€œI don’t think so,” said Peter. “He’s not so bad, really. Probably better than Susannah deserves.” Peter’s derogatory remarks about his sister were halfhearted, automatic, designed to please, and almost without any connection to the real Susannah, who had achieved, with the two of them, the hazy status of myth, she’d been gone so long. “He’s not my type, of course,” Peter added, looking at Rosie for reaction. Such remarks were still fairly daring: he’d confessed his homosexuality to her only a little over a year ago—for Christmas. “Too macho.”
    â€œHmm,” was all Rosie said.
    â€œOr yours, either,” said Peter. “Too counterculture.”
    â€œPlease, Peter.” Sometimes he went too far. “What amazes me,” she said, maliciously, “is that he and Susannah are still together. What is it—four years since the wedding we were so kindly not invited to? He must be a dreadful man.” In the midst of anger and dismay, Rosie felt curiosity creep up.
    Peter refused lunch. It was a Friday, and he always spent Friday afternoons in the computer center at the university. Rosie wasn’t sure why a dissertation on Dante required the assistance of a computer, but Friday had been Peter’s computer day for so long she no longer questioned it, or even thought about it—just as she took it for granted that Barney Macrae got up from her warm bed to go to church on Sunday mornings.
    â€œMr. Chips coming for the weekend?” Unlike Peter’s sex life, hers had been common ground between them for years. “You two going to sit around the fire in your shawls talking about the good old days before there were Cuisinarts and indoor plumbing?”
    â€œSomething like that,” she said, regarding him fondly as he put on his camel-hair coat, his plaid muffler, his red earmuffs. There was always a campy touch, like the earmuffs, or a satin tie with palm trees on it, or a Dumbo watch.
    â€œReally, Ma—can an old guy like Barney still cut