Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Island with a new Ford station wagon in the driveway and every modern appliance you could wish for lined up all shiny and nice on her countertops. A Bendix washing machine. A Dormeyer electric frying pan for making the best Southern fried chicken in town. A hi-fi stacked with “That’s Amore” and “I Love Paris” and the very romantic “Stranger in Paradise.” They even had an air conditioner poking out neatly from their bedroom window.
    “This is what it’s all about,” Gerry liked to say when the kids were asleep and they were sitting side by side on the couch in the den with Uncle Miltie on the TV for company. “This is why I go to work every day. I want my girls to have everything.”
    They had been blessed with so much. Three beautiful daughters. Lovely furniture. Gerry had a good job with her family’s firm, a solid dependable job where you didn’t have to worry there was a communist working at the desk next to you. They would never want for anything.
    The house was everything Nancy could have imagined, and if having that house meant some of her old dreams had to fall by the wayside, well, that’s the way it was meant to be, wasn’t it? Dreams about going to Hawaii or watching the changing of the guard in front of Buckingham Palace were just that: dreams. When they were first married, she and Gerry pored over travel brochures, plotting and planning the trips they would take as soon as he graduated from college. But marriage inevitably meant children, and children meant responsibilities.
    The truth was, you grew up. You got married. You helped your husband through school—thanking God and Uncle Sam for the GI Bill—and then he bought you a house where you spent your days polishing and waxing and cooking.
    Unless, of course, you were Debbie Reynolds or Elizabeth Taylor or one of the other movie stars Nancy read about each month in Photoplay and Modern Screen . Nancy doubted if they gave their linoleum a second thought. Their lives, no doubt, were the stuff of dreams. Candlelight. Flowers. Perfect smiling children who never cried or got sick or needed new shoes every time you turned around. Husbands who never fell asleep in front of the television set with their mouths open, then blamed their snoring on the dog.
    And she’d bet dollars to doughnuts Queen Elizabeth had never once found herself on the wrong side of a loaded diaper bag.
    Now that’s the real story, Mac , she thought, spooning sugar into her cup of coffee. Not how big the crowd is .
    “Hey, Nance!” Gerry’s voice pierced the early-morning stillness. “Where are my brown socks?”
    “In the top drawer of your bureau.” Darn, now the kids were bound to wake up before she had a chance to finish the paper. The only chance she had to be alone with her thoughts was in the hours before breakfast.
    “No, they’re not!” Gerry yelled back.
    “Look under your T-shirts.”
    “I looked under my T-shirts. They’re not there.”
    Grumbling, Nancy tossed the newspaper to the floor and stormed up the staircase to the converted attic room they’d turned into the master bedroom.
    “Good thing those socks aren’t alive, Gerry Sturdevant,” she said as she pulled them from the top drawer of the bureau, “They’d bite your nose off.”
    Gerry didn’t even look embarrassed. He grabbed the rolled-up socks and sat down on the edge of the bed, naked except for his boxer shorts, and pulled them on. “What would I do without you, Nance?”
    She leaned against the doorjamb and stifled a yawn. “Run around without your socks, I suppose.”
    He tugged at the cuff of his left sock. “Up early, aren’t you?”
    I’m always up early, Gerry . Amazing how little men noticed about the running of a house. If she lay in bed every morning until the alarm went off, they’d never make it to the railroad station in time for Gerry to catch the 8:05 to Manhattan. “It’s the coronation day,” she said, watching as he pulled on his other sock. “I don’t