The Side of the Angels Read Online Free Page A

my pessimistic surface I rooted for love just as fervently as she did, though with less faith. It was like being a Red Sox fan. You prayed the Sox might make the play-offs, you cheered them through every victory of the season, but history told you that they’d never win the Series. Somehow it always ended with a heartbreaker in the bottom of the ninth.
    But it was one thing to cheer for the home team, and another to be shoved out onto the field after a disastrous spring training.
    â€œYou have nothing to lose, Nicky. There are three great guys I can think of offhand that I know you’d have a terrific evening with, and that alone would be a boost for your confidence.”
    â€œI don’t know, Louise. I somehow don’t have the courage for meeting a lot of new men right now.”
    â€œI’d hold your hand every step of the way.”
    â€œYou can’t come on a date with me. You can’t feed me the right lines while I make chitchat over dim sum. I promise, Louise, when I’m feeling up to it I’ll give it the old college try, I really will.”
    â€œThen I won’t push you.”
    â€œI’ll tell my mom you did your best.”
    Louise smiled.
    â€œI can handle Aunt Maureen,” she said.
    They understand each other, Louise and my mother. In fact, if my mother could have chosen a daughter, she’d have chosen someone like Louise, someone who, like my mother, was as delicate-looking as a calla lily and as tenacious as bindweed.
    â€œThank you,” I said. “I know you mean well. Unlike my mother, who’s just bossy.”
    â€œGo to your meeting.”
    As I was dusting bits of brownie off my skirt, there was a perfunctory knock, and our cousin Johnny ambled in. I noted Louise’s expression: initial joy, followed by an immediate reining-in of the thousand-watt smile. On Johnny’s face, I could discern no emotion other than easygoing affection, but that was Johnny. He played his cards close to his chest.
    â€œCousinettes,” he said, his nickname for us together.
    â€œWhat brings you here in the middle of the day?” I asked.
    â€œThe same thing that brings you here. I wanted a decent lunch.”
    He scooped some chicken salad into a folded-up piece of wheat bread and began eating, hanging over the table so as not to mess up his clothes. Today he was unusually dressy for Johnny: spotless jeans, his only good blazer with a black T-shirt underneath, and clean sneakers. Over his arm was the classic and becoming charcoal-gray tweed coat that Louise had persuaded him to buy at a flea market in Salisbury, Maryland. Before Betsey came along, Louise picked out most of Johnny’s clothes. Now he would occasionally appear in something suburban and cutesy, like a pine-green cable-knit sweater with snowflakes dancing across the chest, and we would see Betsey’s hand.
    His light brown hair, as usual, was flopping into his eyes. At the shop he had to tie a twisted bandanna around his head to keep it back.
    â€œI came to ask Louise if she’d go shopping with me,” he said. “Betsey’s parents are coming to town this weekend and I need to look nice.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with what you’ve got on?” I said.
    â€œThey want to take us out to dinner. Betsey said no sneakers. I thought Louise might want to advise me on some nice dress shoes.”
    It was always Louise, and still Louise, whom Johnny turned to for advice on how to get on in the real world. At the garage, Johnny knew exactly what to do. But outside the shop, he constantly struggled with a void of information about how regular life should be led.
    Johnny came to live with us a week before his fourteenth birthday because his mother drank. She was also, even more scandalously, divorced. In the months before he came to us, the nuns at Johnny’s school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, noticed that he was arriving at school every day without a lunch, his