Princess Izzy and the E Street Shuffle Read Online Free PDF Page B

publicly about Isabella. On some level that he couldn’t explain, he knew that Isabella’s life was no longer hers and
     that it was unseemly for him to offer up to the public some little piece of it that she’d managed to keep to herself.
    “We were buds,” he explained to Mae. “She’d bring her car in each week, and I checked the tires and brakes. It seemed ridiculous,
     but all those Yale kids were nuts about security. She always brought her books in, but she never studied much. We just talked.
     ‘Solved the world’s problems,’ we liked to say. She’d never heard of the Boss. Can you imagine that?”
    Mae humored her husband with a surprised look, but really, she could imagine it. The Boss was an old nickname for Bruce Springsteen,
     a rock artist of much critical and commercial success. Mae had certainly heard of the Boss, but she was not surprised that
     Isabella had not. Mae was, after all, a born-and-bred Kentucky girl with rockin’ dairy-farmer parents. She was not a noble
     lady from a distant and isolated land. “The boss of what?” would be the expected reaction from Bisbanian royalty, Mae supposed.
    “I loaned her some CDs,” Geoffrey continued. “And we’d talk about them some. She’d warm up peach cider in the break room.
     Put some sort of foreign spice in it.” He paused. “That was good cider.”
    He ambled over to the refrigerator and started rummaging around in it while still talking. “Tell the news all that? It wouldn’t
     be right. Maybe I’m kidding myself. She’s a lady. I’m a mechanic. But I think we’re friends. I don’t talk about her on the
     news. It’s like that Springsteen song where the lawman lets his brother escape. It’s about loyalty.”
    Mae did not see how it was like that, exactly, but she had gotten used to her husband’s strange habit of referencing the works
     of Springsteen as if they were Scripture, so she did not argue.
    But even without the “big” story of a local mechanic’s ties to the soon-to-be princess, the coverage of the royal wedding
     was exhaustive. Stories about the wedding preparations—the ice sculpture of the royal shield; the mild controversy over Isabella’s
     decision to use hothouse tulips rather than native, in-season but somewhat odiferous Bisbanian mums; the security details—were
     on the front pages, even in America. Old professors were quoted saying flattering but vague things about her years at Yale
     (“I remember her as being, um, always there,” said one professor. “And her work was generally well punctuated and perfectly
     adequate”). All the late-night comedians had some fun with the way that three American hairstylists each claimed to have held
     weekly appointments with Isabella, though her hair had in those days been long and straight and appeared to receive professional
     attention on more of a quarterly basis.
    During all these stories, they ran video of Isabella—shopping with the bridesmaids, cutting ribbons at building projects for
     nonprofit agencies, planting mums in a community garden, and swearing, somewhat awkwardly, that if she ever got married again,
     she’d choose mums for her bouquet. “They’re my second favorite,” she said.
    She was everywhere. (And so was Secrest, who was constantly being interviewed about the cake plans and the reception menu
     and was more than once quoted saying that she could not comment on the dress, other than to promise that Isabella would look
     amazing in it.)
    Geoffrey watched the wedding broadcast and listened to his wife explain who all the various dignitaries were as the crowned
     prince of this, the heir to that throne, the Queen Mother, blah, blah, blah, filed into the church. Mae got positively misty-eyed
     at the gown, while Geoffrey only smiled approvingly at the embroidery around the wrists and neckline. “Detailing,” he said,
     with a nod. “That works on cars, too, but I would have picked a color with less contrast.”
    When the happy