In a Perfect World Read Online Free Page B

throat and sprained ankle.
    Why wait? had, in fact, become a kind of mantra. Advertising campaigns repeated it over and over, as did religious leaders. Waiting to buy a thing or to repent of your sins could be equally foolish. The recent increase in the number of marriages was swiftly followed by a skyrocketing number of pregnancies. At the top of the bestseller list was What to Expect When You’re Expecting, followed by The Prophecies of Nostradamus.
    It was said that college students across the country had formed groups devoted to the study of Nostradamus. Why wait to see what the future will hold if we can find out from the past?
    The media connected the war, the fears of the flu, the beautiful and alarming weather, to the behavior of teenagers and adults alike. Bars were crowded in the middle of the day. Workplace affairs were ubiquitous. Unplanned pregnancies and planned ones. There was a pregnant woman on every street corner, it seemed, and a baby being pushed in a stroller on every street. The boys who didn’t go into the military after high school dropped out to become poets. It was said that in Las Vegas it had become so common for gamblers to sit at their slot machines until they collapsed that ambulances were kept idling behind casinos. The twenty-four-hour wedding chapels were busy twenty-four hours a day. So much champagne was being demanded that liquor stores across the country had instituted a one-bottle-per-customer rule to avoid the violent outbursts of customers who came in and found the shelves empty.
    Jiselle, however, wasn’t thinking about the news when she told Mark that, yes, she would marry him.
    She was thinking that she’d waited a long time for this.
    She was thinking that she’d waited long enough.
     
     
    In Montreal, Jiselle found the perfect dress. Off-white linen and lace. Just above the ankle. A low neckline sewn with seed pearls.
    “Four hundred dollars Canadian,” the salesgirl said, “and we can tailor it for you.”
    But it didn’t need to be tailored. It fit Jiselle perfectly, as if it had been made for her. And in her hair she would wear a band of lace from her grandmother’s wedding dress—which had arrived in America in tatters in a moth-filled trunk on a Danish ship. Her mother had kept the scraps of that in her attic all these years.
    “Let me see,” Mark said at the Budget Roadway Inn.
    “No,” Jiselle said. “You’re not supposed to see the bride in her dress until the wedding day. It’s bad luck.”
    “To hell with that,” Mark said. “Life is short. Let me see.”
    “Mark.”
    “What if I die before I see it?” he said. “I’m in a dangerous profession! You’d have to live another sixty years knowing you’d denied me the greatest pleasure of my life.”
    Jiselle laughed, and then went into the bathroom and took the dress out of the tissue in which it was wrapped. A few minutes later she stepped out wearing it.
    “Here,” she said, offering herself in the dress.
    Mark stood up from the edge of the bed. His mouth was open, but he didn’t say a word. As he stepped toward her, Jiselle was astonished to see that there were tears in his eyes.
    Outside their window, a truck roared by, rattling the windowpane with its speed. They were staying in a dirty, noisy motel near the airport. As Mark had warned her she might, the owner of L’Amourette Inn, the lovely B-and-B Jiselle had found for them on the Internet, had refused to check Jiselle into their reserved suite when she was unable to convince the woman that, despite the plates on her rental car, she was Canadian
    The border patrol guard between New Hampshire and Quebec had warned her, too.
    “Nobody’s renting rooms to Americans, Madame.”
    “I’m staying with relatives,” she’d lied.
    He returned her passport and nodded disapprovingly.
    Jiselle had followed her MapQuest directions up a long winding road to L’Amourette Inn, glimpsing it through the pines from a mile or two away—a Victorian