The Cousins Read Online Free PDF Page B

had remarked on it, too. They said it was because time did that when you got older, and then they laughed nervously because they really didn’t want to believe it. She had gotten a postcard from Melissa, who was on vacation in Europe with her husband Bill and the kids, and she had heard from Aunt Myra that Jenny and Paul had taken a weekend house somewhere in Massachusetts on a lake, with their five children, and that Jenny said it was just like camp. She didn’t hear from any of the other relatives, but she didn’t expect to, nor did they expect to hear from her. Everyone was so busy.
    Olivia liked summer weekends in New York with Roger. Everybody who could cleared out and it was easy to get into restaurants and movies. The stores had sales. The family was expected to do their clothes shopping at Julia’s, at the employee discount, because it was good public relations for the employees to see the owners there, and Julia’s had all the best designer collections, but Olivia liked the little boutiques where she could find the crazy clothes she preferred. Of course the family knew it.
    This summer, as usual, it was too hot in New York, and the polluted city air was almost unbreathable, but she and Roger had good air-conditioning. Their four-story town tyhouse was an oasis. They had divided their back garden with a picket fence so half was a dog run, carefully kept clean by their assistants—eager young students—and the other half was for the two of them and Wozzle and Buster. There were trees and flowers out there, and vines grew against the brick wall. There was a gas grill on the flagstones, and a table and chairs under a large umbrella. Years ago they had discussed buying a summer place in the country, but all their money was tied up in the house and the clinic, and besides involving traveling and the purchase of a car, and then garage space, a weekend house seemed too much work, and it still did.
    Roger had just had his forty-ninth birthday. It was hard to believe that he was only another year away from the dreaded Big Five-O. He had insisted on nothing more festive for his birthday than dinner in a restaurant for the two of them, and when she mentioned that next year she should give him a party, he had said he didn’t want to talk about it. They had recently been invited to a fiftieth birthday party given for one of his friends by the man’s wife. It was a big, expensive affair.
    “Women always give fiftieth birthday parties for their husbands,” Olivia said. “But men never give them for their wives. Why do you suppose not?”
    “Because women don’t want to admit it in public,” Roger said.
    “
You
don’t want to admit it in public. I would.”
    “Wait till you get there and then we’ll see if you say that,” he said, and smiled.
    He had started going to the gym four times a week, spending an hour on the Stairmaster and then doing weights. He complained that he was fat.
    “You look fine,” she said. What she really meant was that she was used to him. “I can’t stand anorexic men who talk all the time about cholesterol and Pritikin diets. I couldn’t stand it if you looked like an anatomy chart and your eyes bulged out.”
    “What you’re saying is you like me fat.”
    “You’re not fat.”
    Even with all his disciplined exercise he didn’t look much different, and she couldn’t figure that out, but of course she would never mention it.
    They had planned to take ten days off in October and go to Paris. She had already reserved a room in the charming little Hotel Lenox on the Left Bank, where they had been several times before, and had arranged with a doctor to take over their patients and even let Wozzle and Buster live in his house. In Paris they would do the same things they did in New York: walk, eat, see movies, but it would be in a different place—foreign, exciting—and she was looking forward to it.
    In early September, when kids were back from wherever their parents had sent them