Fundraising the Dead by Sheila Connolly Read Free Book Online

few demands on Charles since their split. He reciprocated by diligently remembering the children’s birthdays, travelling to attend the major milestones in their lives, and generally ceding all responsibility to his amenable ex. Everyone seemed very happy with the situation, including me.
    I’d been married once myself, a million years ago—a college sweetheart, and we did the big wedding thing and lived happily ever after for about three years, at which point we decided we really didn’t have anything in common. When he was offered a good job in California, I think we both sighed with relief for the excuse to split up. He still sends Christmas cards, and I see him when I’m on the West Coast, which is almost never.
    After the divorce, I decided that I needed some stability in my life, so I bought myself a charming (that is, tiny) converted carriage house that sat behind one of the grand old estates west from the city on the Main Line in Bryn Mawr, where the power players of Philadelphia had moved when commuting by train was still new and exciting. I like to think of those upper-crust types having been delivered to the Victorian train stations—which somehow cling to precarious life—in carriages driven by their chauffeurs, or later in motor cars, greeting each other on the platform as they went off for another day of dabbling in banking and lunching at the club.
    But back to my carriage house: the grand house in front has long since been broken up into smaller units, and at the moment I think it houses a group of psychiatrists—the tenants seem to change every few years—but my little place is completely separate. When I bought it, it was barely livable: two rooms upstairs, two down, with minimal plumbing, antiquated wiring, and no insulation. The kitchen was nothing but a jumble of secondhand appliances shoved behind a screen in one corner. In the ten-plus years since I bought it, I’ve added a real kitchen, upgraded the plumbing, heating, and wiring, and filled it with funky, homey semi-antiques, the sort of stuff found at upscale yard sales in Bryn Mawr. Which is exactly where most of them came from, since after paying for the mortgage, and the second mortgage to cover the improvements, I didn’t have a whole lot left over. Small nonprofits don’t pay very well. But the little house was mine, and I loved it. And I loved being able to walk to the train station, since I took the train into the city most days (when I didn’t have a special event or other engagement to keep me in Center City), and I loved being able to leave the city behind at the end of the day and come home to the cool, leafy green suburbs, to the elegance of a bygone day (if you closed one eye and squinted).
    Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy spending time at Charles’s house. It was everything that mine was not: elegant, tasteful, clean (thanks to a series of cleaning personnel who came and went invisibly). He kept his immaculate black and white kitchen (dark granite counters, glossy white tile, halogen lights tucked out of sight so that the light seemed to emanate from the walls and ceiling) well stocked with delightful and expensive goodies, and there always seemed to be a bottle of champagne lurking at the back of the stainless-steel refrigerator. Sometimes it was hard to believe that a real person lived there, since it looked almost like a movie set—what some California director thought an upper-crust Philadelphia row house should look like. No matter: it was like playing dress-up for me anyway, only I was putting on a fancy house rather than fancy clothes.
    I rang the bell, and Charles opened the door promptly. He had been home long enough to divest himself of his jacket, vest, and tie, and his still-crisp white shirt was open at the neck, which for him was the height of casual. He stood courteously aside to let me come in, but as I passed by him, he lifted my hair off my neck and kissed my nape. I shivered, and not from the