In a Perfect World Read Online Free

and said, “You’re not going to move in with a man with three children—”
    “Mom—”
    “—a man who’s out of the country half the month and out of town most of the month. Have you thought about why he’s in such a big hurry to marry you?”
     
     
    Her mother was not, of course, the first one to suggest to Jiselle that perhaps this dashing pilot pursuing her with flowers, and jewelry, and strolls along the Seine, and proposals of marriage, might be looking for someone to take care of his three children. One older flight attendant, who’d known Mark since his first flight, said, when Jiselle told her they were going to be married, “So, I guess his latest nanny didn’t work out?”
    Jiselle flushed, and the woman hurriedly insisted that she was only joking, but Jiselle knew exactly what the woman meant, and she was right about the latest nanny, who’d given twelve weeks’ notice because she was going to marry a geologist and move to Wyoming. All the flight attendants knew the trouble Mark had with nannies, and childcare, and children. Before Jiselle started seeing him, she’d heard members of the flight crew advise him, “Captain Dorn, you need to get married again. That’s the only answer to your problems.”
    “No,” he’d say, “I can move my mother up from Florida if I have to. Believe me, there’s nothing she’d like better than to raise my kids. If I get married again, it will be because I’m in love.”
    When he said this, all the flight attendants tilted their chins, lifted their eyebrows. Some even sighed.
    Jiselle’s therapist also asked Jiselle if she might be “at all concerned about his motives.”
    Jiselle put her hands on the leather armrests of the chair in his office and said, “He doesn’t need me to take care of the children, if that’s what you mean. They have a grandmother.”
    Dr. Smitty Smith looked down at his fingernails and asked, “Did I say I thought he was marrying you to take care of the children?”
    Jiselle knew exactly where this was supposed to go. Instead of answering, she lifted one shoulder, and let it drop.
    “I just don’t want—” Dr. Smith stopped himself in mid-sentence. He almost never gave advice, although he occasionally stammered out the beginning of it. “I’m concerned, as I’m sure you are, that there not be any fuzzy logic.”
    Fuzzy logic.
    Like sins of the father, it was a catchphrase between them, left over from Jiselle’s first session, when she’d made an appointment through the University Health Services—right after she’d dropped out of college but before they’d canceled her student benefits. Her father and Ellen had been dead for a few months, and Jiselle was flunking out, when she’d gotten a paper returned to her from her Western Civilization course.
    On the bottom of it, scrawled in red pen, was “F—Fuzzy Logic.”
    Nothing else.
    As if no further explanation could be given or would be needed.
    Jiselle no longer had any actual memory of the paper itself. Of writing it, of stapling its pages together, of her thesis and argument and support, of handing it in, but the words had stayed with her over the years. They were the words that had brought her to Smitty Smith, in whose office she had wept on that last winter day of her college career, and in which she was smiling helplessly now after announcing her engagement to Captain Mark Dorn.
    Dr. Smith said nothing more until a few minutes had passed in silence, and then he said, “Well, we’ll have to finish talking about this next time,” and then, wearily, like a man with a low-grade fever, “Congratulations, Jiselle.”
    “Thank you,” she said.
    He nodded and said, “But just, you know, think hard about this. Think clearly.”
     
     
    But there were others—plenty of them—who urged Jiselle not to think too hard, to act quickly.
    “Find me a man like that, Jiselle,” another flight attendant said, “and I’d stay home with his brats, I’d iron his