Secrets of a Charmed Life Read Online Free Page A

angles. A hand-lettered Help Wanted sign, still partially taped to a fractured edge, pitched forward onto the frame, and fifteen-year-old Emmy knelt to pull it gingerly from the glassy ruin. She could hear the owner inside Primrose Bridal talking on the telephone to the police, demanding attention be paid her. Someone had crashed into her storefront during the night.
    Julia, Emmy’s seven-year-old sister, looked up at her. “Why don’t the Germans like wedding dresses?”
    Emmy didn’t laugh at her sister’s assumption that the Luftwaffe had blown the window to bits. For the past year they had lived with wailing air raid alarms, drills at school, and mandatory blackout curtains. Several uncomfortable nights had been spent with Mum huddled in the shelter nearest their flat with a dozen of their neighbors when a raid had seemed imminent. Both girls had carried a gas mask to school the past term. It was not so far off the mark that Julia saw the destroyed window and concluded that what they’d been told for a year could happen at any moment had at last happened.
    Emmy rose to her feet with the little sign in her hands. “The Germans didn’t do this, Jewels. None of the other windows on the street are broken. See? A car probably hopped the sidewalk. Hit the gas instead of the brake. Something like that.”
    Julia’s gaze hung on the wreck of the window. “You sure?”
    â€œPositive. We would have heard the sirens, right? It was quiet last night.”
    In fact, the sirens had not whined for more than a week, and the buzzing hum of the Luftwaffe over their heads hadn’t been heard in twice that long. It was as quiet as it had been almost a year ago when the war was new and undefined.
    â€œNo one will want that dress now,” Julia said, apparently satisfied that the Nazis didn’t hate wedding dresses after all. “It’s got glass in it.”
    â€œIt can be shaken out. I bet the bride who buys it will never even know.” Emmy flicked away a sliver of window glass from the Help Wanted sign and read the smaller words beneath it.
Hand-sewing and alterations.Eight to ten hours a week
.
Inquire within
. She hadn’t seen the placard before and wondered how long it had been taped to the window. Surely it had only been within the last few days. Emmy was familiar enough with the window at Primrose to know the sign was new.
    â€œI wouldn’t wear that dress. I like your brides better anyway. Yours are prettier.”
    Emmy laughed easily. “Think so?” She looked past the ruined display to the woman inside who was becoming more adamant that a policeman come that very moment.
    â€œNo, I haven’t been burglarized.” The woman’s voice easily reached the two girls on the sidewalk. “That’s not the point! Someone has run into my window and smashed it.”
    â€œThis one’s too poufy,” Julia continued. “Yours are much nicer.”
    â€œMine are just drawings, Jewels. Hard to know what they’d look like if they were real.” Emmy looked to the chemist’s across the narrow street and saw Mum through the window at the register. She’d be coming out soon. Emmy replaced the placard, but lowered it to the display window’s floor facedown. She would come back later—when the owner wasn’t so distracted—and with her best bridal gown sketches in hand, just in case she needed extra proof that she was worth considering.
    â€œYours are still prettier,” Julia said.
    Their mother stepped out onto the sidewalk across from them. Annie Downtree walked between slow-moving cars toward her daughters. A man in a shiny blue Citroën tipped his hat as he stopped for her. Emmy watched as the driver’s eyes traveled past Mum’s honey brown curls, her slim waist, to her long legs and slender ankles. With only sixteen years separating her mother and Emmy, they had lately been taken for