The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler Read Free Book Online Page A

got out more,” Bella said. “It might help you to—”
    “Thank you,” Lily said again automatically, not really meaning to end the conversation with those two curt words, but ending it nonetheless.
    And with that ending—abrupt, imposed, as insulting to Bella as the closed door of the bedroom, as her husband’s closed face had been day after day, night after night for years—Bella surged again with a familiar, useless anger. And just beneath that anger, the vaguer, more uncomfortable unease she’d felt since the first moments she’d watched Nathan and Lily together. It was there almost constantly, the feeling: when she awoke in the night to the sounds of her sleeping household, Mr. Hausner’s pacing overhead; when she was out shopping, questioning the butcher about the true age of the chicken heclaimed was last spring’s, or commenting to the fishmonger about the cloudiness of a particular carp’s eyes; when she was standing in the peace of her own kitchen shaping raw, minced meat into hamburger patties. Unease so heavy it felt more and more like dread. It was not that she felt she knew the specific disaster that was coming, the specific form her son’s pain would take. It was more a mother’s vague but certain dread as she feels the rumbling of the approaching truck that is still invisible, around a bend, but already bearing down on the little boy who is running happily out onto the street after the ball.
    “Hi, Ma,” Nathan said as he came into the kitchen.
    Bella was sitting at the table by now, fanning herself. Lily was standing at the counter by the sink, her back to them both, slicing and salting a tomato. Nathan lifted Lily’s hair and kissed the moist nape of her neck.
    “It’s hot,” he said, pulling off his tie and jacket.
    The apartment was—by coincidence and unfortunate turns of luck—the same one Nathan had lived in as a child. There had been others in between, some slightly better, some slightly worse, but now this one again, this cold-water, one-bedroom walk-up on Clark Street with its dark kitchen opening onto the back fire escape, and the airless bedroom, now occupied by Nathan and Lily, where Bella’s hope for her own husband and marriage had died.
    Nathan remembered a night—how long ago was it? He couldn’t have been more than five. Sol was about three, Nina no more than nine or ten months. It was a winter night. Joseph came home from work with a valentine for Bella, a card with a man dressed in the fashion of the times and peering hopefully at the reader:
    I’m looking for a Valentine
But none of those Jazz gluttons
I want a handy little miss
Who can sew on a few buttons .
    At the bottom were two buttons sewn right into the card, two little disks of red plastic that Joseph himself may well have sorted. Bella looked at the card, then tore it into pieces and walked out of the room.
    Sol and Nina were already at the table—it was supper-time—Nina in her high chair, banging the tray with her spoon. Sol slipped out of his chair and ran out of the room after his mother. Nathan stayed with his father, retrieved the pieces of the card that his mother had torn to shreds and brought it back to the table. A red and white checked oilcloth covered the table, the red slightly darker than that of the two buttons that had been sewn into the shredded card.
    He worked quietly, aware of but not distracted by the cold draft at his back where the heat of the stove didn’t reach, his father’s silence across the table, the rising racket of Nina’s beating spoon and increasingly impatient vocals. His father rose from the table to get one of the potatoes that was cooling on the counter. He broke it in the palm of his hand, put it on Nina’s tray and then sat back down. The card came back together, but it was painstaking work, the letters and words not providing any clues about which pieces went where, because Nathan could not yet read.
    As Nathan worked and Nina ate her potato, their father