Read Online All Dressed Up by Lilian Darcy - Free Book Online Page B

she was smart enough
after all. She now worked with a very nice agency – a better one
than Lainie’s – and once had been their Agent of the Year. All of
which left Lainie with no-one but herself to blame.
    It couldn’t
have been deliberate on Angie’s part. Could it? To hitch a ride on
Lainie’s hard work and then overtake her?
    In hindsight,
Lainie might not have helped Angie quite so much if she’d guessed
she was being manipulated in such a way. Except if you make a
pre-emptive strike against an attack that was only ever in your
imagination, it’s pretty clear who is in the wrong.
    Not Angie.
    But she
definitely looks like she’s older than me now, Lainie thought,
grasping at straws, watching that harsh late sun on her cousin’s
face, wanting to love her in a much more simple way, with far less
questioning and doubt.
    “Do you think
there’s any chance they’ll get back together, Emma and Charlie?”
Angie asked.
    “You know, I
think there is.” Lainie already felt defensive. She wanted to give
the power opinion, the upbeat one – just like Angie, the spin.
“They seemed so good together.” More honestly, unable to help
herself – she never could, in the end – she added, “But who knows
what goes on, Angie. A relationship is so personal, no-one on the
outside ever understands why it works or why it doesn’t.”
    “They won’t,”
Angie said. “It’s too big of a betrayal, surely. Did he cheat on
her?”
    “No!”
    “That’s
something. That at least makes it possible. Or did she cheat on
him, I wonder? I’m not suggesting Charlie’s the kind of guy a woman
cheats on.”
    Angie seemed,
in fact, to be suggesting exactly that Charlie was the kind of guy
a woman cheated on, which was ridiculous.
    “Do you think
that’s how it goes?” Lainie protested lamely. “That a woman cheats
because of the kind of guy she’s married to?”
    “I can’t
imagine Brooke ever letting Scott cheat on her, let’s just leave it
at that.”
    They left it
at that.
    But then out
at her car, Angie gave a little cry, reached into the back seat and
brought out a whole tray of pansies in little square plastic pots
and said, “I nearly forgot, I was at the garden center and they had
these on sale. I picked them up for you, I know you love them for
your deck,” and gave her a big, warm, generous hug and Lainie, as
for the past twenty-five years and longer, didn’t know what to
think.
     
    Sarah drove
back to Jersey two hours after Emma did, pressured into it by Mom
who had belatedly – and she was probably right – decided that Emma
shouldn’t be alone in Saddle River tonight, no matter how badly she
might behave toward the person who showed up to keep her company.
Dad would be going back down tomorrow, because he had to work
through the summer and only went up to the lake on weekends. Mom
had a scattering of pro tennis coaching commitments in various
places between now and September, but Sarah, as a teacher, had the
whole summer off. It wouldn’t be the first time this had proven
convenient for other members of the family.
    When she got
to Jersey in the fading light, she found Emma sitting on the steps
at the side of the big old Victorian house they’d grown up in. She
was smoking a cigarette. “What are you doing here?” Emma asked.
    “Mom sent
me.”
    “Oh, suicide
watch?”
    “Something
like that. Or weekend detention. For juvenile offenders.” Sarah
looked pointedly at the familiar slender tube of white and gold,
and Emma gave a defensive and defiant shrug but no further reply.
“What are they?” Sarah asked.
    “St Moritz
Ultras.” Their old brand from London. “Want one?” Emma held the
packet out. Her eyes begged and apologized at the same time.
    Faced with the
choice of lung cancer as a route to her sister’s friendship, or
keeping her distance, Sarah reached out her hand. No contest. She’d
take the lung cancer, and meet her sister half way. She loved her
that much.
    Emma lit