The Unfortunates Read Online Free Page B

the morning seated. She is glad. And yet how is it they had not seen? Do any of them know her? How can friends so easily fooled be called friends? Either too lively to notice or too unkind to care. And which would she prefer?
    “Somners don’t like water!” she calls with firm gaiety. She turns and whispers to George and, with hidden determination, cautiously sits back down.
    “But you told me not to change into my suit! Fine, yes, I’ll hurry back.” He hurries back in swim trunks. She watches him descend the steps. He looks up at her, red-faced, and disappears under the water.
    *   *   *
    George bobs away from the boat, rejuvenated. He finds he’s in the general vicinity of the girls from the speedboat, an agreeable place to drift.
    “Great fucking party,” one says, treading. And another: “That lady’s giving us the stink eye, the one pushed up against the rail.” And then Clover, explaining who CeCe is. Her parents say she’s sick. Really sick, like—she grabs her nose and gurgles and sinks beneath the water, breaking back through smiling and spitting.
    How do they know? No one is to know. He considers saying something. He swims away.
    The girls are loud and the news skips across the water.
    “She isn’t well?” one of the widows asks.
    “Swim’s over,” the ambassador says.
    *   *   *
    The guests file up the stairs, all at once. George is last to drip his way up. She asks if everyone is socializing well.
    “What? I don’t know. I have water in my ears. I hate swimming. I’m going to change.”
    There is a tapping and tugging at her calf.
    “Do you know how these eggs got here?” It’s the Foxes’ grandniece, a plastic snorkel and goggles plastered to her wet head, water dripping from the rainbow belly of her swimsuit onto CeCe’s shoes, which, now that they are wet, might as well have gone in the shoe pile. The child is pointing to the refuse of the buffet.
    “How, Maggie dear?”
    “First the farmer buys a lot of birds. He puts them in rows like bunk beds. He feeds them way too much so they are stuffed and he gives them medicine with a needle like our neighbor Mrs. Rose. Mrs. Rose is always allowed to come over. Then the farmer turns on a light that scares the chickens to lay more eggs—”
    “No, dear, these eggs are from wild quail. That means they are quail, not chickens, and they are wild.”
    “My dad says they just put wild on the package because people like it.”
    Parties are so seldom what one wants them to be. She wishes everyone would go home. She wishes she were home. She feels betrayed by each person she’d watched wetly ascend the stair. She scoots her chair closer to the buffet and plucks two eggs from the bed of chopped ice.
    “Have you ever wondered, little fox, how many eggs you could fit in your mouth at once?”
    “No, but at recess when there are grapes—”
    She shoves the eggs neatly into the mouth of the child. “Impressive! Two, perhaps try for three! This boat was once a whorehouse. Do you have an opinion on that? I do. Tell that to your daddy, dear!” The girl’s hands fly to her mouth. Something pulls CeCe’s attention—Iris, on the other side of the buffet. Iris looks away. If CeCe had known the wife and the dog were so nearby, well! She hears the child’s feet slapping across the deck. She slices off the top of a fresh egg’s head using a little spoon and her thumb, scoops caviar into the recesses. She watches Iris join George, now under a heap of towels, watches him reach out to Iris from inside the mound of terry cloth. CeCe calls merrily to the fleeing child, “More eggs, dear, a different kind of egg!”
    Dana Barnes is looking at her oddly. CeCe smiles. “I hope it hasn’t been too difficult for you, not smoking this afternoon? Was that a secret?”
    “Oh, CeCe.” Quite unexpectedly, CeCe finds herself crushed to the woman’s swimsuit, enveloped in a wet hug. “We’re so close by, you call us anytime you need. Day or