Read Seating Arrangements for Free Online Page B

married or I won’t. I’m not jealous. I’m looking forward to this weekend being over. End of story.”
    “That’s not quite the spirit, Livia.” Yearn as he might for the end of the wedding hoopla, Winn knew he must ride in front of the troops, sword raised, toward a successful event. “Especially from the maid of honor. You’re in charge of honor.”
    He meant it as a joke, but she said, grimly, “I thought you weren’t impressed with my honor.”
    He refrained from answering. They passed a marshy pond crowded with cattails and bulrushes.
    “Look at the egret,” she said
    Winn glimpsed a tall, slender shape and a flash of white wings. “It’s a heron,” he said.
    “No, it’s an egret. Egrets are white. Herons aren’t.”
    “Well,” said Winn in a voice that signaled he was being kind but not sincere. “All right.”
    In town, the traffic was slow, and without a breeze the car was warm. Livia shifted the flowers, and some greenery tickled Winn’s hand. He pushed it away. Livia sighed and rested her elbow on the window’s edge. “All these people. Too many people.”
    “Hopefully they’re not all wedding guests,” he said.
    She snorted. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to share a room with Celeste?”
    “I think I can imagine.”
    “After the lights are out, I hear ice cubes rattling around. Then she tries to get me to girl talk with her and whispers questions about my love life until she falls asleep, which is when she starts snoring. You can’t imagine. She sounds like someone trying to vacuum up a mud puddle.”
    Many times in the past, over holidays or vacation weekends, Winn had been kept awake by Celeste’s industrial rumble from several rooms away, but he said, “Buck up, pal. I’d appreciate if you’d contribute by being nice to your aunt.”
    “I contribute. I contribute in lots of ways. I’m the maid of honor. I’m a servant to the pregnant queen. Why do I also have to be a companion to the drunken aunt?”
    “Celeste has had some rough breaks along the way. The charitable thing would be to cut her some slack.”
    “She’s a gargoyle.”
    “She’s a ruin.”
    “Of her own making. I can’t get away from her. She’s everywhere with her martinis and her stories. She’s like, ‘Roomie, did I tell you about the time my third husband ran off to Bolivia with my best friend’s daughter? You don’t know heartbreak until your third husband has run off to Bolivia with your best friend’s daughter.’ That clink-clink, clink-clink, clink-clink that lets you know she’s coming—it’s like the shark music in Jaws .”
    “Be thankful you weren’t around for that divorce, the Bolivian one. That was a dogfight.”
    “I don’t think a divorce that happened twenty-something years ago is an excuse for her to be a complete mess.”
    “What do you propose we do?” Winn said. “Should we put her in a burlap sack and push her off the ferry?”
    “The sack is probably overkill.”
    “If she wants to get drunk and say the wrong thing, then that’s what she’s going to do. And as much as we’d like for her not to exist, she does. Death, taxes, and family, Livia.”
    THE FARM might have been the end of the earth. A thin seam of ocean sealed its fields to the sky, all of it coppered by the sun. The water’s surface, choppy and striated with light, was beautiful, but Livia liked to think about what was teeming underneath: phytoplankton, of course, stripers, bluefish, bonito, maybe tuna, certainly fish larvae and fry, worms and mollusks in the sea floor. Pelicans diving to fill up their huge mouths. Seals. Perhaps a whale, although they were rare around Waskeke. In previous centuries, the islanders hadhunted sperm whales and right whales almost to extinction, and Livia suspected the animals still picked up bad vibes from the surrounding waters.
    The older she got, the more claustrophobic she felt within her family. Her father’s desire to join clubs had once seemed