Deadly Beloved(95)
“Brides,” she said, indicating a tall young woman in a fantastical white dress that seemed to be made of tiers and tiers of lace. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
“Beautiful,” Gregor agreed.
The girl turned away and started to cut the picture out of the magazine.
Brides might be beautiful, Gregor thought as he headed for the lobby, but marriages were complicated, and after a week like this, he didn’t want to think about it.
TWO
1.
THERE WAS A SHOW on one of the cable stations about brides. Dozens and dozens of tall young women with no hips and arms like toothpicks paraded down a runway one after the other, showing off creations in satin and silk. Evelyn Adder watched them move as her husband sat at the kitchen table with Sarah and Kevin Lockwood, looking over some papers they had brought. For most of the time Sarah and Kevin had been there, Evelyn had been starving. It was unheard-of for Henry to be home so long in the middle of the day. Evelyn had the window seat on the landing filled with Hershey’s Kisses and bagel chips. She had two dozen bags of potato chips and six of those dips you could buy on the same shelf as the refried beans. She had a box of frozen White Castle hamburgers that just needed to be fried up. Sarah and Kevin and Henry were all ignoring her. Kevin kept reading bits and pieces of the papers he wanted Henry to sign. Sarah kept talking about their winter vacations in Boca wherever-it-was, making the place sound like an upper middle class street in Victorian England instead of like a piece of Florida real estate.
“Being able to get good help makes all the difference,” Sarah would say. “It changes one’s life completely.”
“The appreciation of land values over the last ten years has been truly phenomenal,” Kevin would say, “especially land directly on the waterfront.”
One of the brides on the runway had a dress that was cut up to her thigh in the front and had a long train. Another one of them had a dress that looked like millions of puffy pastel-green mints held together with string. There was a picture of Evelyn in her wedding dress on the shelf above the television set. She was very thin, and her dress was a plain white thing that could have been a uniform. There used to be pictures of Henry in the house when he was fat, but now there weren’t any. Only Henry’s publisher had those.
“What I like best about Florida is the lack of people,” Sarah Lockwood said. “You wouldn’t think it the way it looks on the news, but really all the overcrowding is down in places like Miami. Up where we are it feels like there’s nobody around at all, except that it’s better than that, because there really is. I think you picked the prettiest piece of land we had.”
Evelyn picked up the remote and went from channel to channel, from shopping to fixing up old houses to cooking in a wok. She felt leaden and gross, the way she always did these days—but for some reason right at that minute it wasn’t so bad. She found another show about brides and one about marriages. If you weren’t careful to keep a psychological reference book on your bedside table at all times, your marriage would surely be doomed. There was a show with Martha Stewart about weddings, explaining how to make favors from bits of net and gold foil. Evelyn chose a local station with a soap opera on it and sat back. The soap opera seemed to be about impossibly thin people who were miserable about almost everything in their lives, although it was hard to figure out why that was.
“Thirty-five thousand will be more than enough for now,” Kevin told Henry. “It’s when you choose what you really want to build that you have to throw some more in. When your architect has plans you want or when you decide on one of the stock plans the development company puts out. Our house here came from a stock plan.”
“Ours did too,” Henry said. “The guy showed us what he intended to build, we walked through a model on the other side of the city, and here we are.”
“I preferred the Victorian myself,” Evelyn said matter-of-factly, knowing nobody was listening. “There were things I liked about this house, but I liked the Victorian better.”
“We bought a stock plan down in Florida too,” Sarah said. “It just seemed so much easier. If you’re really picky, I suppose it would be all right to fuss with architects and all that sort of thing, but I really can’t see it.”
“I just don’t want to wake up tomorrow morning and find that, cashier’s check or no cashier’s check, I don’t own this piece of property because the owner thought someone else had made a better offer.”
“Nobody else is going to make a better offer,” Kevin said. “I’m as near to the owner as you’re going to get. I’m not talking to anybody else but you.”