In a Perfect World Read Online Free Page A

shirts, I’d wax his floors.”
    A chorus of flight attendants gathered around her at the gate and agreed.
    When Jiselle herself uttered reservations (“You know, I haven’t even met his children yet…”), this chorus sang out in unison, “Who cares? They’ll be awful! All children are awful, whether they’re yours or someone else’s! But you’ll be married to Captain Dorn!”
     
     
    In Jiselle’s fantasy, the children were not awful. When she imagined herself with Mark’s children, they were always sitting in a circle around her in a forest. In this fantasy, a soft bed of fallen pine needles was spread out beneath them, and Jiselle had her gilt-edged collection of Hans Christian Andersen tales open on her lap—the book from which her father used to read to her—and she was about to start a story.
    It didn’t matter, for this particular fantasy, that Mark’s daughters were certainly too old to be read to, or that once, when Jiselle visited his house while the children were in Madison with their nanny, she’d picked up the diary of one of the girls and read the most recent entry:
    If he marries that fucking bitch, I’m going to make her life a living hell.
     
    The diary was black and leather-bound and had been left on the kitchen counter, where, surely, the new girlfriend of her father visiting the house that weekend was supposed to find it.
    Jiselle had put it down and stepped away from it slowly. Her heart had been thrumming like a bird trapped in a box.
    But, in Jiselle’s fantasy, Sara would come to realize how much she had in common with her new stepmother, and how much she had missed not having a mother all these years. She would confide in Jiselle and grow to love her.
    In her fantasy, Jiselle and the three children in the forest were all wearing white, and although they were sitting on the ground, their clothes did not get dirty.
     
     
    The afternoon he asked Jiselle to marry him they were in Kyoto, in bed in a hotel room full of cherry blossoms, and they’d left the curtains open while they made love.
    Afterward, they went to the window and looked down.
    The roads were thronged. It was the day of the Lantern Parade, which was one of the city’s most important festivals, or so Jiselle had been told by her taxi driver, in perfect English.
    Conceived during a plague in the ninth century as a ritual to purify the land and to appease the rampaging deity Gozu, the first parade had ended the plague, and so had been held every year since by the citizens of Kyoto, who even managed, the driver told her, to keep the Americans from dropping an atomic bomb on their city with their religious devotion and their beautiful parade.
    Ten stories below them, a float made entirely of pink blossoms moved along slowly, trailing long silk flags through the streets. From a throne at the center of it, a little boy in Shintu robes was swinging a pale yellow lantern. When the boy looked up, Jiselle yanked the curtain around her naked body as quickly as she could, although he couldn’t have seen her so far above him—a woman in one of a hundred tiny windows in a tower, looking down.
    “I’m not a perfect man, Jiselle,” Mark said. “I’ve got some baggage. But I’m in love with you. And I need you.” He turned from the window to her. “They need you, too,” he added. “We’ll be a family.”
    An automatic family.
    Was it such a crazy thing to want?
    At the checkout lines at every airport gift shop were women’s magazines and tabloids announcing HOW TO KEEP YOUR FAMILY SAFE IN TROUBLED TIMES, beneath the stunning, smiling, face of Angelina Jolie, as full of inner peace as any medieval Madonna, her brood of twelve children gathered around her.
    “Why wait?” Annette said when Jiselle expressed surprise that Annette was already pregnant only a month after marrying her pediatrician, Dr. Williams, thirty years her senior, the very doctor who’d administered Annette’s first vaccinations, treated her strep