for help. Not when she was supposed to be the happy bride, only a week shy of her wedding to her doctor’s brother.
Maddy found some antihistamine capsules in her kitchen and downed two, even knowing that they’d make her sleepy in the middle of the day. She slipped her bare feet into a pair of cherry-red sneakers gotten for twenty percent off at JCPenney’s, and headed down the front stairs to see what the rest of the family was doing.
Ten minutes later she was sitting on the carpet in the second drawing room, surrounded by boxes, ribbons and tissue paper, once more playing Happy Bride. And trying to ignore the itch that seemed to be crawling up her back.
Jessica Chandler, Maddy’s older sister, sat cross-legged on the Oriental carpet with her, the two of them in the center of the room surrounded by white linen covered tables displaying many of the wedding gifts as they opened today’s deliveries.
At least one of the gifts was always good for a laugh.
“Ah, just what you need most, Maddy,” Jessica said, holding up the unwrapped gift. “Another silver tray. What does that make now—ten of them? You’d think somebody would have some imagination, wouldn’t you?”
“Great-Aunt Harriet has some,” Maddy replied, warily eyeing the object in her hands. “What is this?”
Jessie laughed out loud. “And we have today’s winner. What is it, Maddy? I don’t know, wait—it’s Great-Uncle Albert!” she suggested, still giggling. “I wouldn’t lift the lid if I were you. Especially if you feel a sneeze coming on.”
“Funny, Jessie, very funny.” Maddy looked at the vase, or ornamental urn, or whatever the devil she held in her hands, then carefully placed it on the carpet, still unable to believe what she was seeing. Her chin began to itch, but she ignored that, too.
The “Thing” Great-Aunt Harriet had sent by messenger—Maddy already had decided to think of it as the “Thing”—stood at least two feet high, and was fashioned out of some sort of porcelain. And it had to be old as dirt, something Great-Aunt Harriet had pulled from her collection and forwarded to her great-niece instead of just sending her another silver tray, like any normal person.
The Thing had a lid, and the lid had a handle—two close-to-naked cherubs cavorting. The Thing also had side handles, both of them similarly un-clothed cherubs bent forward at the waist, and looking as if they were about to do swan dives onto the floor.
She and Joe would have laughed and laughed—no! She would not think of Joe O’Malley again.
She scratched at an annoying itch behind her knee, and went back to inspecting her latest gift.
The Thing was so ugly, so overdone with intricate scrollwork and rosy-cheeked cherubs, and even bits of faux greenery, that Maddy was sure it had to be worth a small fortune. Ugly things almost always were. Worst of all, it seemed familiar; like something she’d at least seen a variation of during her college studies.
Carefully removing the dome lid and placing it back in the box, Maddy lifted the remaining piece and inspected the bottom of the base. “Nove, with an asterisk under it. Good Lord, Jessie, it’s a Le Nove. I should have known. I remember one from my classes—covered in shells and painted with mythological figures. Look, there are shells on this one, too, along the base. Well, at least now I know what to say in my thank-you note to Great-Aunt Harriet.”
“You sure do, Maddy. ‘Dear Aunt Harriet, thank you so much for the exquisite Nove. It will look so lovely in the basement storage area.’”
Maddy rolled her eyes, even as she scratched at her chin. “Jessie, this is a Nove. Straight from the late 1700s. A true, if revolting, work of art. I wouldn’t put it in the basement. Great-Aunt Harriet meant well, and always does.” She replaced the lid, tucked the vase back into its box. Then she smiled evilly. “I’ll give it to Allie.”
“Only if you want to be cut out of my will, young lady,” Almira Chandler said as she walked into the room, looked down into the tissue-filled box. “Did I hear someone say Great-Aunt Harriet? For our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she sent back the silver compote your grandfather and I had given her one Christmas. That’s Harriet, the idiot. Some people give gifts that keep on giving, or whatever. Harriet just keeps recycling the same old stuff. I imagine it makes some sort of sense—to her.”
“But you love her, Allie,” Maddy said. “You love her because she’s three years younger than you and looks ten years older. Like you’ve said, you just can’t turn your back on a woman who makes you look so good at family parties.”
“Twenty years older than me, Maddy, not ten.” Almira laughed as she peered down into the box. “Now, what did the idiot send over now? The woman’s been cleaning house and stuffing up all her relatives’ houses for the last decade, saying she’s going to die any day and wants her treasures in loving hands first. Which,” she ended, straightening, “explains that hideous Chelsea tea caddy Mrs. Ballantine keeps insisting on putting on the breakfast table. Just what I want to wake up to, certainly. A grinning idiot figure of a man with a round, bare belly and a lotus leaf for a hat. He even has teeth, for crying out loud. And Harriet will linger on another twenty years, until she’s buried us all under her junk.”
“Very valuable junk, Allie, according to Maddy, our very own Art History major, although we probably should remember she graduated with only a C average,” Jessie interjected, opening yet another box, pulling out yet another silver tray. “My, Maddy, this is your lucky day, isn’t it?”
Maddy looked at her sister, slimmer than her, taller by four inches, older by three years. Jessie had dark honey-brown hair as opposed to Maddy’s own deepest black, pale blue eyes to her vibrant green. She was a bright, talented, successful young woman with a lifelong air of dignity and composure about her that Maddy had always envied, even as she had tagged after her, worshiping her.
Jessica was so confident, so sure of herself, and always had been. So successful, working side by side with their brother, Ryan, in the family business.
Maddy wished she could be more like her sister, rather than being the “baby” of the family, the one without a job, without a career, without, it seemed, much ambition or direction at all. And not expected to have any of those attributes, either, come to think of it.
If they’d had a Chandler family pet, they’d expect it to learn more tricks than they had ever expected from Maddy. No one in the family had batted a single eye or made a single comment when she’d withdrawn from her graduate courses, come home and learned how to cook pot roast. She sometimes wondered if she’d accepted Matt’s proposal because she loved him, or because he, at least, seemed to think she had some sort of potential.
Not that Joe O’Malley hadn’t thought she’d had potential. As a lover, that is. The asking her to be his wife part had only been an afterthought, she was sure. Something he thought he should do. Especially when he was about to lower the boom of his grand get-rich scheme. Having her safely married to him before she found out probably had seemed like a good idea at the time. The rat.
And now the rat was rich. Filthy rich. He didn’t need a little wife cutting coupons and sewing on buttons. Not that she had taken those courses just to make herself better equipped to be Joe’s wife, if the man were to come to his senses and figure out he simply could not live without her. Not at all.
Maddy stuck out her tongue, swiped it over her top lip, which had begun to tingle ominously.
And not that she needed grad school or cooking classes to strike out
