Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner

Author:Leslie Morgan Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780312377458
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

People complain—with enthusiasm—about the stress and expense and family tantrums that make up the drama of most weddings. But admit to an awful honeymoon? It’d be easier to open up the PA system at the local Wal-Mart and announce that your husband gave you herpes.

More than anything, Conor and I required a cheap honeymoon. In April, sitting at my white desk, I’d opened a distinctly unfriendly letter from the mortgage company about our myriad late payments. My American Express card had been canceled in May, via a form letter ordering me to cut up and return my card. I still kept the little green rectangle in my purse, a talisman from my New York life. But I knew it was useless. Our dire daily cash flow meant I could only take out twenty to forty dollars from an ATM at once, hardly enough to get traveler’s checks for a romantic sojourn to Italy. I’d scoured my brain, scanning for affordable places that would still be marginally romantic.

One day a few weeks before the wedding, as I drove to pick up Conor from work, I’d thought of Martha’s Vineyard, the secluded island off the Massachusetts coast. We could drive there, and take our car on the ferry. We’d continue the twenty-dollar-per-day local cash machine habit instead of taking out lumps of cash in advance. We’d rent a cottage instead of an expensive hotel room. We could still make it sound and hopefully feel like a real honeymoon.

Once, with Winnie and her family, I’d come to the tiny pile of rubble at the tail end of the massive glacier that slid down from Canada. As a twelve-year-old, I took my first flight alone in a puddle jumper, up and away from the tiny Vermont airport near our cluttered, noisy farmhouse to Winnie’s family’s enormous Victorian estate, complete with tennis court, a pond with an island, a private beach, and a little bakery at the end of the winding, tree-lined driveway. Winnie and I and her babysitter stayed in our own guest house, listening to “Hot Child in the City” on her babysitter’s boom box, French braiding each other’s hair, talking about boys from school until we fell asleep in our sleeping bags. Winnie’s family sold the estate when we were thirteen. She’d never been back. But as a college student, I took a bus from Boston and then the ferry to the Vineyard by myself, to spend a day visiting the island, going to the bakery, the private beach next door to her old house, standing at the bottom of the winding driveway to catch a glimpse of the house’s peaked shingle roof above the trees.

Conor had never been to Martha’s Vineyard, despite living his entire life less than three hours away. The treeless streets and gray concrete of Southie might as well have been two million miles from the Vineyard’s private white beaches and Victorian “cottages.” Conor, who had never said a word about our honeymoon or how we’d pay for it, agreed Martha’s Vineyard would be fine.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.