Read A Dress to Die For for Free Online Page B

idea why you’re so attached to the thing anyway. How many hundreds of dresses did you make? This one got under your skin, and I don’t know why.”
    Mom kept walking.
    Laura got in front of her, walking backward. “Why?”
    “Nothing.” Mom tried to dodge left.
    Laura lunged right, getting in the way. “Tell me.”
    “Laura Priscilla!”
    “We’ll walk to Rockefeller Center, and you can tell me beside the Christmas angels. Or we can ice skate.”
    “I’m going home.”
    “So am I.”
    **
    The train rumbled over the bridge. In the short space of time between tunnels, the phone got enough signal for her to text Jeremy.
    — Going back with Mom, sorry —
    — She okay? —
    — Crazy, I think —
    — You don’t come from nowhere —
    “What are you smiling about?” Mom asked as they went back into the tunnel and the signal died.
    “Jeremy texts in whole words. I like that.”
    “He’s very good to you.”
    “He’s a jerk,” Laura said, but she was still smiling.
    There had been a rare November snowfall the night Mom had met Jeremy, Laura’s lover, instead of Jeremy, Laura’s boss. No wind blew the flakes from their downward spiral as they landed on his black lashes and hovered there for a second before melting. He had a short beard then, which attracted its own white down, and he was adorable in every way, with his arm around her and an easy smile, as if the only place he wanted to be was walking with her on a block in Brooklyn.
    He’d insisted on buying flowers, though they’d make Mom more uncomfortable than anything. Or not. It wasn’t as if Laura had ever brought anyone to meet her mother. And certainly not someone so huge, so much a presence and a history as Jeremy St. James. She’d spent half the morning in the bathroom, wondering if she should look better, smell better, or take more time or less trying to appear as though she and Jeremy were in the same league.
    But to Mom, she was beautiful, right? All of her implications and downright accusations that Laura was being used for some nefarious purpose pointed to the fact that there was a disconnect in the relationship that Mom could see without ever having met him. And it irked Laura, because she had assumed the disconnect had to do with surface things, where Mom should be concerned with the more important things.
    Despite all her mother’s smirks, rolled eyes, and pursed lips when Laura had spoken about Jeremy, Mom smiled warmly when they got to the restaurant and told him that she’d heard “so many good things” about him. They had plenty in common, having both gotten fingers caught in sewing machines and hands burned on steamers. They both knew how to fix a Merrow machine and turn a coverstitch without stretching the fabric. They had stories and anecdotes and laughed about the same old garmento jokes. Laura felt comfortable enough to go to the ladies’ room when the check came.
    Things had changed when she returned to the table. Not terribly, nothing that would make a normally sensitive person uncomfortable, and it wasn’t because Jeremy had already taken care of the check by surreptitiously giving the server his card when they’d arrived. Nor was it the huge volume of dinner Laura had left behind as an offering to her nerves. The change was simply the absence of the chatter and laughter, as if she’d taken it to the bathroom with her and left it there on the sink after she washed her hands.
    She and Jeremy were walking to the train station when she finally asked him if anything had happened when she’d stepped out.
    He answered as though he’d been waiting for her to ask. “I know where you get it now, and the more I think of it…” He stopped midstride and bowed his head.
    “Jeremy, what?”
    When he looked up, he was obviously trying to hold in his amusement. “I mean, it was so you , even the expression on her face when she said it. She said, out of the clear blue…” He let out a laugh. “This is... I mean, it’s