Toss the Bride by Jennifer Manske Fenske Read Free Book Online

Leland house, Mrs. Leland plans the evening. She likes to pick out a movie for all of us to watch, although I learned pretty quickly that she talks all the way through the flick. She enjoys asking questions such as, “Who is that? Is he the killer? Is he going to kill someone?” until Avery says, “Watch the movie, Mother! We don’t know yet!” I like hanging around the Lelands. They are very different from my family, but not an awful different.
    To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t know if his mother is all that happy. She has sad eyes sometimes. If I really think about it, it seems like having scads of money actually gives you more headaches, not fewer. For me, I knew I had to go to work when I was done with high school. My grades really weren’t much to write home about, so college was a dim, vague dream. Avery, on the other hand, had a lot more choices. Half of the time, I believe he’s still trying to decide what road to take. At least, I think so.
    I pass another dinosaur, this one with an eager college-age worker standing under it. The worker is holding a large bone. He looks nervous, poor guy, like he knows he should approach the small knots of parents and kids wandering through the room and offer them some sort of dinosaur demonstration. Maybe wave the pitted bone around, giving the kinder a mouthful of facts. But the poor kid looks scared, totally whipped and nervous. I think about going over to him and asking a lame question about the dinosaur whose crotch he’s standing under. You know, give him a boost.
    Instead, I realize I am tired. I have spent all day keeping up with Maurice and his demands. He’s all right, but sometimes, blast it, I grow tired of helping other women get married. I’d like to toss the whole lot of them out of the window, to tell the truth. I sigh, remembering I would have to go back to waiting tables or gift wrapping at Luck’s.
    Thinking too much about Avery makes me clench my jaw, so I duck out of the dinosaur room and head into the Okefenokee Swamp. The exhibit is set up, like all of them, to imitate a place. It’s a hard thing to do, and I think the museum pulls it off as best as it can. The birds aren’t moving, though, and the water is stiff Plexiglas, and all of a sudden, I am deep down sad. The swamp’s birds were real once and now they are stuck on sticks that jut up out of cattails. Really, it’s no life that I can appreciate.
    I pause on the swamp boardwalk that snakes through the exhibit. A red-shouldered hawk hangs above me, frozen on a wire with a snake in its talons. Herons and other birds I think I should know are crammed into the space to my right. A bullfrog pulses a deep-throated warning. I read a little about the swamp. I learn that the swamp’s cypress trees will eventually take over because that’s what cypress trees do. They’ll make a thick, knitted space where earth can form and then the swamp will be out of business. Just like that, it will be gone.
    While I’m standing there, the bullfrog music gets louder. And the lights start to fade. At first the lights dim slightly, then freefall from color to a darkness that tells me night is on. I almost feel the rush of a night wind in the wet swamp. A mosquito hums near my ear. In the other room, the dinosaur is forgotten by bored children. Then, without a skip, the lights turn up and it’s morning in the swamp. More birds join the looped audiotape. It’s bright and pink, the way a sunrise always is when you’re looking right into it.
    A group of tourists enters the room. They have noisy children. I read the rest of the swamp information. It seems the only way the poor Okefenokee can get out of its predicament is to have a good ol’ fire. Apparently, when the fire destroys the cypress trees, the spaces of earth between the trees collapse, and all of the water is free to be swampy again. The lights start to dim again, and I