Dreams Are Not Enough by Jacqueline Briskin Read Free Book Online

finger-press the creases from the red fabric of that horrendous dress. Her jitters had heightened Barry’s own uptightness about the coming encounter.
    Gripping the steering wheel, he wished that he’d been flush enough to take her shopping in Vegas, buy her a sweater and skirt and thus tame her exuberant beauty. By free association, he saw an image of Beth, so cool and conventional, the classic coed. Bethie, he thought. Thank God she’ll have already broken the news.
    Alicia intuitively caught the drift of his thoughts.
    “Barry, will your sister be home?”
    “Sundays she usually is. She lives at the AEPhi house.”
    “Is she at UCLA, too?”
    “No, USE.” He didn’t elaborate that his Uncle Desmond was paying his twin’s tuition at the private campus as well as her sorority dues.
    Drawing a deep breath, he touched Alicia’s arm.
    “Let’s go in,” he said.
    Since there was no vestibule, they stepped directly into the living room. Beyond the pair of wing chairs and couch—all covered with the same worn maroon early American pattern—was the dining ell. Tim and Clara Cordiner sat opposite each other.
    Clara’s hair, dyed an uncertain shade between red and brown, had been brushed back rather than carefully ratted into a bouffant, and she wore a navy housedress. Tim had on his old blue tee shirt with the bleach fade.
    As his parents looked up questioningly, Barry’s stomach plummeted.
    They don’t know.
    “Where’s Beth?” he asked stupidly.
    “She stayed over at Uncle Frank and Aunt Lily’s,” Clara replied in that unfortunately pitched, nasal voice.
    “Dear, if you’re not coming home, I do wish you’d call. I was awake nearly all night listening for you. Saturday morning I found Beth’s note saying she was off to Las Vegas with you and the others.”
    Tim’s eyes were going up and down Alicia’s curves.
    “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friend?”
    Barry grasped Alicia’s fingers.
    “Sh-she’s quite a bit more than a ffriend,” he stammered.
    “Mom, Dad—this is Alicia, my wife. We were married yesterday in Las Vegas.”
    He might just as well have jabbed them with one of those electric cattle prods being used by Mississippi sheriffs against civil rights workers. Tim’s leer was replaced by slack-jawed surprise. Clara’s loud gasp faded into a drawn-out moan and her veined hand went to her chest. Since her coronary she had been preoccupied with the flurries and splutters of her unreliable heart.
    Alicia broke the silence.
    “I’m very happy to meet you, Mr. Cordiner, Mrs. Cordiner,” she said softly.
    Tim pushed to his feet. This being Sunday, he hadn’t shaved; his gray-blond hair had receded to the back of his pate, his belly bulged out in his faded tee shirt. Yet his height and the breadth of shoulders made him an impressive physical specimen, and now, in his anger, he was downright intimidating.
    “The hell you say,” he growled.
    “Married?” Clara whispered, the tendons of her thin neck straining.
    “You’ve never mentioned her. How long have you known her?”
    “A month,” Barry exaggerated.
    “Alicia? What’s her other name?” Clara addressed Barry, as if Alicia were a mute.
    Alicia said, “Cordiner. But it was Lopez.” Her voice held a note of defiant humor, but the hand that Barry held was shaking.
    Clara went gray. Tim moved around the table to pat her thin shoulders with awkward tenderness.
    Barry asked, “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
    “It seems to me you’ve said it all, buster!”
    “Please, Tim….” Clara murmured warningly. She knew that the Cordiner temper was at its most unregulatable in her husband. When the twins were nine, he had gotten into a fight with another grip, knocking him cold. The man had died on the way to the Magnum infirmary. It had taken all of Desmond Cordiner’s considerable influence downtown to get his brother off without a prison term.
    “Please what?” Tim bawled.
    “He barges in with some