Evil Eye Read Online Free PDF Page B

height of about five feet two. Her miniature toes peeped out, the nails polished ruby-red to match her fingernail polish and her pursed smiling lips.
    â€œPlease—come inside. And your suitcases—shall I . . .”
    Though she’d been anticipating Ines’s visit for several days, Mariana wasn’t prepared for such a surprise: why hadn’t Austin warned her that his former wife was disfigured? (Unless Austin didn’t know? Was that possible? The missing eye had to mean cancer—didn’t it?)
    And there was Hortensa: plain, dour, with skinned-back hair and small close-set eyes, flat-heeled ballerina slippers, mud-colored polyester trousers and matching jacket, about Mariana’s age and height but at least fifty pounds heavier. In her sullen face Mariana’s bright smile was rudely deflected and in response to Mariana’s greeting there came a barely audible mutter.
    Mariana led their guests into the foyer. She was deeply embarrassed, anxious. She’d seen that Ines was amused by her discomfort over the missing eye. And whatever Ines was saying to Hortensa, in staccato Spanish, was probably not flattering to her, the new, young wife.
    Mariana wanted to call for Austin to announce that their guests had arrived but she knew that Austin wouldn’t like to be interrupted. In his bedroom, or in his bathroom, preparing to be seen by others, Austin did not care to be hurried in his elaborate personal grooming.
    Mariana took the heavy tote bag from Hortensa and led the women into the guest wing of the house, which had windows facing the Pacific. All the while Ines was exclaiming, chattering brightly—Mariana couldn’t follow her words, so heavily accented they might have been Spanish—while Hortensa followed in her aunt’s wake, flat-footed and unsmiling.
    You could see a family resemblance between the older woman and the younger: but where Ines’s features were delicate, and the geisha-white cosmetic mask gave her a bizarre sort of histrionic beauty, Hortensa’s features were coarsened and plain; in defiance of her aunt’s glamour the niece wore no makeup on her sallow skin, had done nothing to soften the effect of her coarse thick eyebrows, and refused to stretch her thin, flat, colorless lips into anything approaching a courteous smile.
    Where the aunt was petite, a doll of a woman who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, the niece was hefty, stolid as a young heifer; inside the mud-colored polyester jacket her breasts were enormous as swollen, sagging fruit.
    Mariana’s first houseguests, in her new marriage! She was feeling just slightly faint, Ines’s perfume like a rich, overripe fruit wafted to her nostrils.
    She hoped that Austin would hear Ines’s high-pitched voice or the sharp clatter of her shoes against the tile floor. Mariana wanted to scream at him Come here! Help me! Your wife has arrived.
    â€œAus-tin! How good to see you! And not changed at all—or almost. A year flies by quickly, does it?—so much happens, yet no change .”
    Whatever Ines was chattering in her maddening bright voice Mariana couldn’t follow. She saw that Austin greeted his former wife with a forced sort of hearty enthusiasm, as he might have greeted a visitor to the Institute whom he knew slightly; with a stiff little smile he stooped to allow her to brush her lips against both his cheeks, leaving a ruby smear on both cheeks that would have annoyed him greatly if he’d known. For the evening Ines had changed into a startling costume—a puckered strapless top in deep purple satin, incongruous with her bony shoulders and thin, flaccid upper arms, and a flimsy skirt like cobwebs, cut at an angle so that it looked torn. Around her thin neck was a jade necklace that had to be, Mariana surmised, a gift from Austin, for it very much resembled the jade necklace Mariana herself was wearing, though it wasn’t so ornate or so heavy