The First Wives Club by Olivia Goldsmith Read Free Book Online

of feeling. She was alive to every nuance, every change in him. He shifted subtly, moving on his arms, merging his hips with her own. She felt hungrier, needier than she ever had before, but her shame and anger were gone. All that was left was the pleasure, the benison of his body pressed into hers.
    “Who are you?” she asked. He was looking down at her, watching her face, and then moving his eyes lower, watching himself enter her. He bent his head to kiss hen-again those hot, dry, sweet kisses. “Who are you?” she asked again, nearly out of her mind with the pleasure.
    ”I’m the man who wants to make you feel better than anyone ever has,” he said, holding her tightly as she came.
    Cynthia Swann’s Song.
    The first thing Annie heard when she opened the door to her apartment was Sylvie murmuring to Ernesta, and Ernesta’s gentle, lilting voice in response.
    Annie paused for a moment, taking in the sounds, knowing they were to become her happy memories. Letting the door close with a clack, she tried to shake off the sadness, calling out with a lightness she didn’t feel, “Hi, ladies, guess who’s home.”
    “Mom-Pom,” Sylvie called as she came bounding from the kitchen, a colorful napkin still tied around her neck. “Mom-Pom. Ernesta made me a grilled cheese sandwich and she let me make tomato soup and I didn’t burn myself cause I’m a good cook.”
    Sylvie’s round face was bright with the joy of accomplishment, her almond eyes opened wide at its wonder. The face that had been so cute and beguiling on a five-year-old now seemed oddly out of proportion on a girl of sixteen. Not for the first time Annie tried to reconcile the teenage body of her Down’s syndrome child to the five-year-old’s mentality.
    ”Come back in here, Sylvie, and finish your lunch. That’s the good girl,” Ernesta called out.
    Annie kissed Sylvie and patted her cheek. ‘Go on, honey. I’ll be there in a minute.” She watched as Sylvie skipped back to Ernesta.
    Annie walked through the living room to the glassed-in conservatory where she kept and nurtured her small collection of bonsai trees. She sat back against the soft pillows of the antique chaise longue and took a deep breath, kicking off her damp, mud-stained pumps. She was so very, very tired. She didn’t know how she was going to do it. The funeral and burial and Stuart Swann had drained every ounce of vitality out of her, but she still had to lay out clothes for Ernesta to pack for the trip to Boston tomorrow. And there was still the packing for Sylvie to be finished.
    Annie closed her eyes, wishing she could succumb to the sleep she needed so badly. Maybe things in Boston will go well, she thought.
    Maybe things will get better. Then, sighing, she stood up and walked back to Sylvie.
    Later, she was labeling some of Sylvie’s boxes when she heard the porter drop her mail on the mat outside the apartment door.
    It was the usual collection. A bill from Bergdorf’s, a card from Alex up in Cambridge, half a dozen catalogues. And then there was the letter.
    It was unmistakable. The Old Greenwich postmark. The weight of it.
    With a sick feeling in her stomach Annie turned it over. There, in perfect engraved script, was the return address, Mrs. Gilbert Griffin.
    Annie didn’t want to open it. She knew that what she would find inside Cynthia’s envelope would be shattering. And Annie already felt shattered.
    Somehow she got down the hall to her bedroom and stretched out like a corpse on the bed, the letter lying on her lap like a piece of white shrapnel. As she opened the envelope, Pangor jumped up beside her and nuzzled his nose under her chin. Usually she found it comforting, but now it was distracting. She looked down at the spidery, shaky handwriting.
    Dear Annie, Please forgive me for asking you to hear what I have to say. I’m afraid to die without letting the one person who loves me know why. First let me say that everything—everything—was my own fault.
    My