Last to Know Read Online Free Page B

freezer. Guilty on all counts, she thought with a fond smile. Kids were kids and that’s just the way life was.
    She was living in Greenwich Village when she met Wally, sharing the smallest apartment possible with two other girls, yet even so, paying the rent was a continual worry.
    If there was one thing Rose could be thankful for though, it was the year’s cooking lessons she’d taken, and the joy she got from them. And the weight she gained because of them.
    Her curves certainly hadn’t kept the guys away; Rose could have taken her pick; she could, as her mother told her after she’d accepted Wally and brought him home to meet the family, have done better for herself than a penniless would-be writer who picked up the occasional script job on a TV series that almost paid his way, with about enough left over for them to share a pizza and a beer and a cozy night, for which no money was needed, spooned together in his single bed after they had made earth-shattering love, unable to let go of each other because if they did it was so narrow one or the other of them would fall out.
    With money earned from the sale of his first story Wally bought her a ring, the flattest, thinnest diamond ever seen but at least it looked big. Rose recalled their celebration, at a proper restaurant. Was it the Sign of the Dove? Something like that, somewhere in Manhattan on a rainy night clasping hands across the table, her with her left hand pointedly up flashing her new status, wearing the tight black cashmere sweater her mother had given her last birthday and a white pencil skirt that clung sexily to her rounded rear, with beige suede heels soaked from the walk in the rain because financially a taxi was out of the question, her hair a-frizz from the damp, curling all over the place, her brown eyes golden with love for him. Wally, her all-American boy. They were all of twenty-one years old, both of them. Old enough to vote, old enough to drink liquor, and old enough to marry. Certainly old enough—or young enough—to have so much sex Rose would hurt from the love-bruises on her inner thighs as she walked to NYU the following morning, worried about her degree in English Lit and Anthropology though what she would do with either of them was debatable.
    Those were the good times, Rose thought now, when their only problems were how to be together and how to make enough to pay the rent and to eat, with a little left over for a bottle of Italian red. Inevitably, she had gotten pregnant. Marriage followed. Not the small “family-only” ceremony Wally had pictured, but an outrageous blowout, a Christmas garlanded church packed with family, some of whom Rose hadn’t seen in years; her friends in fancy getups and staggeringly high heels; huge football player buddies of Wally’s; their college professors; even Wally’s great-grandma made it from Seattle, Washington. Looking at her, serene and smooth-skinned, cheekbones still holding everything up, Rose glimpsed her future children in that face.
    Oh, she had been such an outrageous bride though, in long, clingy scarlet silk-velvet, strapless, with her golden breasts spilling out under a little white ermine shrug and the string of good pearls her parents gave her as a wedding present. Wally said he thought a new car would have been a better choice, but, hey, that’s who her parents were. And she was their only child.
    She could remember the look of love and pride on Wally’s face even now, as he waited for her at the end of that long white-carpeted aisle. Rose had chosen white carpet rather than red because of the contrast with her dress, and Wally was drop-dead handsome in the pinstripes and tails her mother had insisted on. Even rented, Wally made them look good, a red carnation in his buttonhole, one of the old-fashioned kind that were so hard to find especially at Christmas time, flown in to a pricey Manhattan florist. Malmaison, now Rose remembered the name. She had thought it odd to call such