Read Online A Wedding on the Banks by Cathie Pelletier - Free Book Online

shouted. His clothes began to shrink, to hurt him, an embalmed suit of skin.
    â€œMonique Tessier,” Thelma said again, and turned to look at him. He had grown even more portly, this man she had married. He had grown chins, and unusual habits, and away from her. She took a Polaroid picture from beneath the sofa cushion and handed it to him.
    â€œLook familiar?” she asked. Calm. Beneficent. This surprised her. Wasn’t she usually flighty, illogical, overly emotional? This must be, then, the new her. She must have grown already from the news of this nasty business. In truth, she had forgotten the day’s handful of Valiums.
    Junior took the picture and gazed at it. Polaroids. How he hated them. What ever happened to the old-fashioned way of processing film? How nice it would have been if Thelma had had to drop her film off at the mall for three days. Or send it to Boston. Or Hong Kong. It would have given him days to think. Yes, there they were, him leaning on the door of Monique’s old Buick, just about to give her a little good-bye peck. His lips were moving with words. What had they been? Oh, yes. You’ll see. Things will get better, honey. That’s what he had been foolishly saying just as the blasted Polaroid had snapped and frozen his guilt forever. Bronzed it. Things will get better. Sure, but for whom, that’s what he hadn’t asked himself.
    â€œIs that,” Thelma asked, “or is that not Monique Tessier?”
    Junior struggled for an answer. He pondered heavily, as if to be of help to Thelma in her identification of the culprit, to ingratiate himself, to fling himself into her side of the ring. His eyebrows knitted with disgust. He wanted to say, “What’s she doing away from her desk? She’s supposed to be working! Me and the old man will need to look into this tomorrow.”
    â€œAh,” was all he said. He was struck with the fullness of Monique’s breasts in her cotton sweater, with their pendulous appeal. And right there, even upon the burning coals of this fiery inquisition, he wanted to bury his head between them. “She does look like Elizabeth Taylor,” he thought.
    â€œWhat are you looking at?” It was Cynthia, his oldest daughter, engaged to a young dental student.
    â€œNothing,” said Junior, and stuffed the photo into his hip pocket.
    â€œA picture,” said Thelma. She had no idea she was capable of such composure.
    â€œWhere’s Regina Beth?” Junior asked quickly, hoping to lead Cynthia to the sidelines and away from the heat of the action. If Thelma kept it up, the goddamn picture would be in the Portland Telegram in the morning.
    â€œIn her room reading. Where else but with her nose in an book?” asked Cynthia, and turned up her own nose, which looked as if it had never even smelled a book, much less been in one. She tugged at the legs of her jeans, pulled them down, away from her. She had been born, Cynthia Jane Ivy had, long-waisted. At least that’s how Thelma described the malady. Shorts and pants tended to ride up into the crotch area. Cynthia was chafed constantly as a young child, and Thelma had kept a steady supply of talcum as a powdery buffer. But as she got older, Cynthia found the best remedy was a constant relocation of clothing and she perpetually tugged her garments down into more comfortable locations. As a result she fidgeted constantly, and was even sent to the principal’s office in the fifth grade by an insensitive teacher who incorrectly diagnosed a kind of civil disobedience as the cause. Thelma had gone, red-faced, to the principal’s office to explain. “A birth defect,” she had told the man, her eyes lowered to the floor by the weight of what she thought was a family secret. “She lives with pain,” she had added. The nervous affliction had even kept the poor child off the cheerleading team. At tryouts, while the other five girls flew like