The Wedding Sisters Read Free

had grown up, the spot where her favorite bookstore used to be. Growing up on the Upper West Side—before it was the least bit fashionable or even particularly desirable—Meryl’s favorite refuge had been Eeyore’s bookstore on Broadway near West Seventy-ninth Street. There, her lifelong love of books had taken root.
    The first book she remembered ever so subtly planting facedown by the cash register was Fifteen by Beverly Cleary. Meryl had been ten. It was the most romantic book she had ever read, and by the time she was in middle school and walking to the bookstore by herself, she was snatching up Barbara Cartland and Victoria Holt novels by the excited armful.
    In college, the bodice rippers were replaced by the classics and, of course, the mandatory Feminine Mystique and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. But by that time, her obsession with romance novels had been supplanted by her first real-life romance—a romance sparked by the worst English class Meryl had ever suffered through.
    It had taken Meryl three semesters to get into the coveted American Literature II: 1865 to the Present class with Professor Dunham. Students who loved reading—who lived and breathed it—wanted Dunham. They knew he was the toughest, but he was also charismatic and brilliant. For true lovers of literature, he was the only one to trust as their guide from Whitman to Roth.
    Unfortunately, Meryl got more than she’d bargained for. She struggled with Faulkner and stumbled with Thomas Pynchon. The optional “office hours,” run by Dunham’s TA, became essential to her academic survival.
    At first, the soft-spoken TA, Hugh Becker, barely registered with her. He was a means to an end, her lifeline in a class that she had wanted so badly but was now her personal Titanic. Becker was tall and thin, blond and blue-eyed—not at all her type. But he had the artistic hands of a pianist or painter, and when he spoke about “The Beast in the Jungle,” he was as passionate as Neil Young with a guitar. And she noticed—she wasn’t completely blind after all—that when he spoke of Henry James’s heroine May Bartram, he looked right at her. Every time.
    Disappointingly, Meryl got a B+ in Dunham’s class. She’d never earned anything less than an A in any English class, ever. She was angry at herself, annoyed with Dunham, and eager to wipe the slate clean with a new semester. She didn’t think about American Literature II, Dunham, or his fair-haired boy Hugh Becker again, until she got an invitation in the mail three weeks before spring semester ended. It was the final days of her sophomore year, and Hugh Becker had invited her to a party—his book party.
    He had published a book! Nonfiction. Abby May Alcott: An American Mother. It was incredibly impressive to Meryl, an almost unthinkable accomplishment. She toyed with writing a book someday—a novel. Or maybe short stories like Susan Sontag. But Hugh Becker had done it—he was a published author.
    The party was in a town house just off lower Fifth Avenue. Meryl dragged her roommate along, and they were the youngest people there. With feigned sophistication, they drank white wine and ate cheese and crackers. Meryl felt out of place and slightly bored and decided she would eat just enough that she wouldn’t have to buy food for dinner. And then she spotted Hugh Becker across the living room at the same time he saw her, and if there was such a thing in real life as “electricity” between two people, she felt it in that moment—an exhilarating spark.
    Hugh Becker was not nearly so uptight as he had seemed in class; he knew his way around the town house (his agent’s), and he confidently ushered Meryl into a small bedroom left vacant by the agent’s college-aged son. There, he proclaimed his overwhelming attraction to her, his desire for her—confessing that he had barely been able to contain it