The Sunflower: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

her bridesmaids were ready. Now she just had her own dress to worry about.
    Her wedding gown had been her great-grandmother’s. It was cream satin charmeuse, embroidered with crystals and pearls.
    According to the bridal magazines, cream (or candlelight, as they called it) was ideal for fair skin like hers. The dress was stunningly beautiful but had obviously been made for a woman of another era. The hips were fine, the bust small but sufferable, the waist downright impossible. She had, out of necessity, worn the gown for her bridal photos. The waist was so tight that she would have screamed, she told the photographer, if she could draw enough air into her lungs to do it properly. She had always thought that she had a small waist, and she wondered if women were really so much smaller two generations ago or if they just had more effective corsets and higher tolerances for pain.
    Now the dress was at the seamstress’s, and she considered checking on it again to make sure it would be done on time but was afraid to. The last time she had phoned, the seamstress told her that she would have had the gown done if not for her incessant calling.
    On the bottom of one page she’d scrawled: Remind Martin to get his father and Robert in to the tuxedo rental. She crossed it out. She’d just call them herself. Lately, it seemed that every time she discussed wedding details with Martin he became irritable. In the last week they had gotten into several small tiffs and just yesterday she had called Jessica, her best friend and maid-of-honor, in tears. Jessica had reassured her that quarreling before the wedding was as much a part of the process as choosing flowers. “Nothing to ruin a marriage like a wedding,” she said.
    Not that she was making it easy on Martin. Christine had fantasized about her wedding day since she was ten and was so insistent on every detail that there were times when she felt more like Bridezilla than Bride Beautiful. All things considered, Martin had been remarkably patient—as well as smart, successful and handsome. Wedding stress aside, she was a lucky woman.
    Christine’s wedding plans matched the fantasy in her head in all but one point: she had no one to give her away. Her father had died two years earlier of cancer, but even if he had lived, she wouldn’t have asked him. Her parents had divorced when she was nine. While her mother had never remarried, her father had married within a few months to a younger woman with two small children. With time he became a stranger to her. He didn’t even attend her high school graduation, just sent her a check for fifty dollars that she had angrily thrown away.
    She looked at her watch. Her bachelorette party was tonight and Jessica said she’d be by to pick her up at six. The thought of the party made her anxious as well. Even though Christine had made her promise not to do anything too wild, she knew that her request might simply have encouraged Jessica to do just that. It was Jessica’s ongoing quest to get Christine to “let her hair down.”
    Christine and Jessica were proof that opposites attract; if Christine was silk, Jessica was leather. Christine never had more than one boyfriend at a time, while Jessica never settled with less than a bevy of them as she found them “more manageable” that way.
    Both women were beautiful but in different ways. Christine’s beauty was more classic—the kind of look you’d admire in a fifties movie but wouldn’t know what to do with offscreen. Jessica was more playful—bare midriffs and Daisy Mae shorts. Men moved quietly around Christine, like she was a porcelain figurine. Jessica never spent a weekend night home.
    And both women, in their own ways, envied the other. Christine envied Jessica for her fun and brashness. She envied the way life seemed to bounce off of her. And while Jessica relished making fun of Christine’s propriety, she envied her too for her steadiness and clarity, for everything she was