Read Someone for Free Online

for me by the unmistakable smell of drink on his breath, a lovely, masculine scent, I thought, because it was my father’s.
    When the sidewalk in front of the church and the border of the church steps were filled with wedding guests, Dora and her new husband finally appeared. In the sunlight, and with the perfumed crowd all around us, it was difficult to tell if the groom was handsome. He was chubby and squarely built in his dark suit, much like Dora herself, but he raised his free arm as he and Dora came down the steps, shielding both of them from the onslaught of rice, so it was only after they had gained the safety of the hired car and he had taken his bride’s elbow to help her in that we briefly saw his face. It was a disappointment: round and smooth-cheeked, with little chin and a small mouth stretched into what was, even to our eyes, an awkward smile. He ducked into the car beside his bride and gave us only his profile, which was not promising, as the car drove away.
    I turned to Gerty, and Gerty shrugged. Even without Big Lucy there, something fell away from the morning, some sparkle.
    At home, my mother drew in the air between her teeth when I told her how Big Lucy had shouted after the car. She blessed herself and looked around and said, “No good can come from that,” and then repeated the gesture and the look the next morning in church when Dora Ryan appeared between her brother and her sister, the mother and father right behind her, the dark veil of her hat pulled over her broad face. Father Quinn could not have had the attention of a single woman in his congregation on that morning, for even as they genuflected, blessed themselves, bowed their heads to pray, their eyes were drawn to Dora’s gently quaking shoulders, her parents’ stiff spines. My mother said later that it was possible that the groom was a lapsed Catholic, or that he was sleeping off the night’s festivities, or that Dora had simply come home to catch Sunday-morning Mass with her parents before heading out on her wedding trip. It was possible, but the girl’s posture, her parents’ grim faces, told us otherwise. When Mass was over, the family left as they had come, the girl (who was no girl, really, well into her thirties by then, broad-bottomed, thick-ankled, and in her dark suit and hat without any of the dreamy girlishness that her wedding gown had lent her just the morning before) flanked by her parents now, her siblings trailing, but none of them pausing for the crowd outside the church, going instead—“pell-mell” was how my mother put it, discussing this strange development over breakfast at home—out of the church and across the sidewalk and around the block.
    My father said the poor fellow wouldn’t be the first groom to find himself under the weather the morning after the big day, not to mention the big night, and winked at Gabe, who smiled and nodded to show he understood, but then looked at my mother and blushed solemnly.
    My mother’s eyes bounced from Gabe to me to my father, and then with more speed, and more intention, to me again and back to my father. “Nonsense,” she said, and raised her chin and pinched her nostrils, once, twice, as was her way. As if somewhere in the vicinity, some scent of tragedy, as yet undefined, still lingered. “My heart went out to Dora Ryan this morning,” she said, looking over her shoulder to the kitchen that was filled with morning light. “It really did.”
    On Monday, Gerty was not in school, and when I walked by her house on the way home, a large lady was sitting on the steps. She wore an apron and scuffed black shoes and her stockings were rolled down around her mottled ankles like circlets of excess flesh. She was cooling herself with a feathered fan, although the day was mild and damp. The woman fastened her eyes on me as I approached, and in shyness, I veered away, crossed the street, kept walking. I went around the corner and would have gone on home except that just as