Waking Kate Read Online Free

and taking her hand and kissing it.
    And so Eby’s family would have to wait a while longer, even though letters from home were becoming increasingly more forceful and concerned. It’s not seemly, her mother wrote, to stay on a honeymoon this long. You were only supposed to be gone two weeks! Your sister and I are getting tired of making excuses for you. Come home to Atlanta. Take your place.
    On their way back to the hotel, they approached a restaurant they knew by the smell of fried sausage thick in the air. The bell over the restaurant door rang, and yellow light from inside melted into the fog like butter. They stopped when they heard voices. A man and a woman walked out of the restaurant laughing, whispering. Their voices faded into the seductive night, where couples often pressed themselves into dark doorways, unseen. They could be so silent you didn’t even know you were walking by two people making love until you passed though the red-lit steam of their desire. There had been times when Eby and George had been overcome. Their first night in Paris, Eby had felt reluctant when George had taken her by the hand and led her under a footbridge, pressing her against the damp stones, kissing her while lifting fists full of her skirt. But then she’d realized how free she was here, and she’d begun to think, This is me. This is the real me. C’est moi, she’d whispered over and over.
    And this truly was her. This was her decision, her happiness. Marrying George wasn’t something she did to help her family. Money flowed through her family’s fingers like spring-water. They couldn’t seem to keep hold of it. And generations of Morris women had sincerely tried to fall in love with rich men. Eby’s sister, Marilee, had been their one true hope. Rich men liked beautiful wives, and Marilee was sure to snatch one with her blond hair, which shone like rabbit fire, and her fierce green eyes. But the moment Marilee set eyes on the boy who filled their family’s car tank with gas, she was gone. To everyone’s surprise, it had been Eby, tall and strange with crooked features—whose one true accomplishment was that she was the first child to read every single book in the school library—who ended up marrying rich. Morris relatives in five surrounding states had attended the wedding, their hands out for money, like this was their triumph. What they didn’t seem to understand was that Eby didn’t do it for them. She’d been in love with George since they were children. But not a single soul believed her.
    George was talking of Amsterdam again as they approached what the Parisians called the Bridge of the Untrue, rumored that young lovers weren’t able to cross if their love wasn’t real. It was the last bridge they crossed before their hotel came into view. Eby almost pulled back as they drew near. She didn’t want to return to their hotel so soon. But that made her smile to herself. When did after midnight become soon? What she was really avoiding was the post that would inevitably be waiting for them: more concerned letters from her mother, more requests for loans from relatives, more invitations from her new peers to join clubs and parties when they returned, more snarly notes from her sister, Marilee, for whom all of this was supposed to happen, and because it hadn’t, she seethed like water the second before it rolls to a boil. There might even be a phone message, which the owner of the hotel thought was rude. Eby’s mother didn’t understand. She was a typical southern American woman whose social lifeline was the telephone wire, to be used as often as possible.
    It would take time in Amsterdam for their old lives to catch up to them again. They would have a few weeks to themselves there, at least. That was good.
    Eby and George stepped onto the bridge. Ancient lemon-ball lamps appeared one at a time in the fog, growing gradually brighter as they approached, then dimming out as they passed, as if invisible hands