The Last Little Blue Envelope

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Book: Read The Last Little Blue Envelope for Free Online
Authors: Maureen Johnson
had done it before. And at least this Oliver, Oliver, Oliver loop was a distraction from the Keith, Keith, Keith loop. That was something.
    The debate continued until a black cab pulled up out front. There was a jingle of keys, and Richard was at the door with three large Harrods bags.
    “Hello!” he said. “I have . . . bloody hell.”
    “I decorated,” Ginny said, pointing out the obvious.
    “Yes, I see that.”
    It was hard to read his reaction. He wasn’t ambivalent—his eyes were wide and he rubbed his hairline.
    “It’s . . . wow. I don’t really ever . . . I suppose I don’t have time . . . it’s marvelous. I have half the food hall in here. The roast dinner! Come on. We need to put this in the kitchen.”
    She was pretty sure he was lying, but he was obviously happy to be home. As they headed for the kitchen, he casually slipped one of the bags behind a chair. Just as casually, she looked to see what it was. Wrapping paper peeked out at the top. He had gotten her some gifts.
    “It was absolutely mental,” he said, dropping the remaining bags on the counter. “I must have sent out two hundred Christmas hampers this morning. Some people don’t realize that if you want to send someone fifty pounds of chocolates inside of a decorative birdhouse for Christmas you should really ring me before eight in the morning on Christmas Eve.”
    “Any celebrities?”
    “A few. Nobody was too bad this year. I didn’t have to find any exotic animals or enriched plutonium or anything like that.”
    Richard wasn’t exaggerating about the roast dinner. There were easily thirty different containers in the bags. When the last one was put away, Richard took a beer out of the refrigerator. “I’m too tired to drink this,” he said, looking at it mournfully. He put it back in the fridge and shut the door. “I have to sleep.”
    He stopped halfway up the steps and had a look at the lights strung there. “Someone from your family has always decorated my house for Christmas,” he said. “Peg did last year. Her decorations were a bit weirder, as you might imagine. She suspended the tree upside down, for a start.”
    “She what?” Ginny asked.
    “By drilling a few holes in the ceiling and suspending it. Right there, in the corner.” He pointed to just above where she was sitting. Sure enough, there was a series of small holes there. Aunt Peg, once again, had been down this road before.
    “Was it a big tree?” she asked.
    “It was enormous.”
    “And she just . . . hung it?”
    “She did. I’m glad she didn’t bring the ceiling down. Even if she had, she probably would have turned the rubble into more decorations. I still don’t know how she did that. I suspect she had help. In any case . . . I’ll see you in the morning. Merry Christmas.”
    That night, as Ginny lay in bed staring up at the collage on the wall, her brain drifted back to a brutal summer’s day in New York City when Aunt Peg said, “Let’s go swimming. My friend has a pool.”
    This was about three years before, when Ginny was a freshman in high school. It was right before Aunt Peg vanished from their lives. Ginny didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time she stayed in Aunt Peg’s apartment in the East Village. New York City summers are punishing affairs—intense heat magnified off steel and glass, more heat coming from the subways underground, heavy, blanketing humidity that makes you feel like you weigh ten extra pounds. New York is a watery town. It sits between rivers, has a huge harbor, and swamp. For environmental and aesthetic reasons, Aunt Peg did not believe in air-conditioning. Plus, her apartment was directly above a Chinese restaurant. The apartment that was so cozy and warm in the winter from all the rising heat below was torturous in July. It was like taking a sauna in fat fumes.
    So Ginny had been pretty miserable until this pool was mentioned. She was also confused, because having a pool in New York City meant

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