Aurora 08 - Poppy Done To Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

“But he was going to be with a lot of people he knows really well, and I haven’t been with him very long.”
    She nodded. You had to have a pretty firm footing in a relationship to be dragged into a massive “meet the friends” situation. “Still, he asked,” she said.
    It was my turn to nod. We both knew what that meant, too.

    That was our last pleasant moment for the rest of the day. Our sister-in-law had died a terrible death, a violent death, and John David still hadn’t been located. Poppy’s parents had to be called, which awful job Avery agreed to undertake. All the Queensland men were tall and attractive. Avery was certainly the most handsome CPA in Lawrenceton, but his personality did not live up to his face, which could have been devilish if there’d been any spark in it. Avery was one of those men always described as “steady,” which is what you want in an accountant, of course. He was the older brother, and had been a year ahead of me in high school. Instead of playing football like John David, Avery had played tennis; instead of being elected class president, Avery had been editor of the school paper. He’d added to the local gene pool by marrying Melinda, who’d grown up in Groton, a few miles away.
    Poppy had gone to high school in Lawrenceton. She and John David had been five years behind me at the local school, which in those days had meant I was hardly aware of their existence. Her parents, who’d had her late in life, had moved to a retirement community a couple of hours’ drive away after she’d graduated. Poppy’s father, Marvin Wynn, had been the local Lutheran minister, and his wife, Sandy, had worked in the registrar’s office at the local junior college. The whole community had pitied these righteous people when Poppy, their only child, reached her teen years.
    But she’d never been arrested or gotten pregnant, those two grim incidents typical of wild teen years. And by the time she’d gone to college, she’d more or less settled into a relationship with John David Queensland. It had been a tumultuous one, and they’d broken up and reconciled more times than any onlooker could count. Neither Poppy nor John David had been faithful during the off-seasons, and maybe not even when they were supposed to be going steady. This pattern seemed to have continued even after they’d eventually married, five years after they’d graduated from college and begun pursuing their careers. Amazingly, Poppy had been a great elementary school teacher. I’d heard how good she was from more than one set of parents. And John David seemed to be able to talk almost any doctor into buying his company’s pharmaceuticals.
    After Poppy had had Chase, almost any onlooker would have been excused for assuming that life had settled down for these two former wild kids.
    Not so.
    Though I’d always liked Poppy, and had often admired her terrifying habit of saying exactly what she thought, I didn’t approve of some aspects of her marriage. To me, marriage is the chance to put away the trappings of a single life and concentrate on making one good thing work really well. The cornerstone of this would have to be—in my view—faithfulness. There have to be some assumptions you make when you agree to bind your life to another person’s, and the basic assumption and maybe the most important of all is that this person will get your exclusive attention.
    Poppy had had at least two flings that I knew about, and I would not have been surprised to hear there had been more. I had tried—real hard—not to judge Poppy, to enjoy the part of her I liked and ignore the part that made me queasy. I behaved this way for several reasons. The most important reason was that I was also bound to her by marriage, my mother’s marriage, and to make a family work, you have to be willing to keep your mouth shut and park your judgments by the door. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was complicate my mother’s life by