The Pretty One: A Novel About Sisters by Lucinda Rosenfeld

Author:Lucinda Rosenfeld
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction / Family Life, Fiction / Contemporary Women, Fiction / Romance - Contemporary
ISBN: 9780316213578
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2013-02-05T08:00:00+00:00

12

MOSTLY SUNNY, with a high of 85 and a 50 percent chance of a late-afternoon shower. Clearing overnight. That was the forecast in the complimentary copy of the Miami Herald that had been left outside Perri’s hotel room door. Now she was reclining in a teak and canvas beach lounger by a kidney-shaped art deco splash pool. Past the point of showing off her thighs to anyone to whom she wasn’t related, Perri was dressed in a black bikini top with plenty of support and a paisley-patterned sarong. A five-dollar glass of lemonade bedecked with a striped straw sat on a wrought-iron table to her left, and a self-help book called Awakening at Midlife, which she’d ordered before she left, lay unopened and so far unread in her lap.

Lifting her face into the sky, Perri felt for once blissfully indifferent to her own neuroses, including those to do with her skin. (Though, admittedly, she was wearing a medical-grade Swiss sunscreen with a micronized zinc formulation.) She felt indifferent to her future, too: all that existed for her was the delicious if relentless lashing of the sun. She lay there until she couldn’t take it anymore. Then she sat up and reached for her lemonade. As she sucked the sweet and cool liquid down her throat, she looked around her at the mise-en-scène—mostly Russian tourists in the act of tanning and flirting. The men had shaved heads and large biceps and were smoking Marlboro Lights. The women had suspiciously circular breasts and were wearing too much lip liner, lending them the appearance of sexy clowns. They were probably in their late twenties, Perri thought, suddenly recalling that she was supposed to be that age, too. Or, at least, Ginny Budelaire was supposed to be that age. Wrenched back to reality, Perri shuddered at her own gall in having checked into the hotel under the other woman’s name and with a fictitious credit card to match.

And the credit card was arguably the least of her sins. She’d also walked out on her husband and kids and was about to hook up with her old college boyfriend, Roy Marley. Only, what if she wasn’t attracted to him, or he to her? Surely, he’d already seen the snapshots she’d posted of herself on Facebook. But all of them were strategically flattering, three years out of date, shot at dusk, and featured Perri only from the waist up. Then again, she’d finally shed ten of the fifteen extra pounds she’d accumulated over three pregnancies—or four, if you counted her late miscarriage between Sadie and Noah. Having a midlife crisis, it turned out, was the ultimate weight-loss technique. (Grapefruits be damned!) Moreover, Roy was a virtual stranger at this point. If the two failed to hit it off, they’d simply go their separate ways—no harm done. Alternately, if the chemistry was still there, their affair would be Perri’s special birthday treat to herself. And no one had to know about it but Roy and her.

And no one would know, Perri had already decided.

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