Simmering Wedding
by Marilyn Celeste Morris
Trudy, Maggie and Nell were bent over the card table, beers at their elbows.
“I couldn’t get Leah,” Maggie reported, shuffling the cards.
“In all this rain? She wasn’t home?” She frowned.
“She’s probably ‘napping’ again,” Maggie said with a shrug.
But Nell, on her way back from the commissary, had seen the staff car arrive at Leah’s earlier that afternoon.
Perhaps it was the rain, Leah reflected later. The damn rain had everyone upset. Avery was certainly at his worst — for whatever reason.
The driver had deposited her at the hotel entrance. Normally, Avery would have been at the steps with an umbrella.
This day, there was no Avery, no umbrella. She ran through the downpour, through the lobby and up the elevator to the apartment.
She rang the bell and The Colonel’s manservant opened the door.
“Colonel say Missus wait,” he said while Leah removed her coat and wet shoes. “He be berry busy on base.”
He took Leah’s wet things and padded into the recesses of the apartment, leaving Leah alone in the living room.
Business? It must be something terribly urgent, she thought as she poured vodka at the large lacquer bar.
She looked around the room. What she had once thought was beautiful now struck her as downright offensive. Gaudy, garish and tasteless.
How could she have been taken in by this place? And by this man? She had to get out of this, somehow —-but how? She had to think of David, and French, and any other man on this base who happened to look at her ——
She heard the front door open and shut. “Sorry I’m late,” Avery pecked her cheek absently. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Not long.” She fixed him a drink, automatically. “What was the emergency?”
“Business, Leah.”
“That’s all you men can do, is tell me its business. Do you think I can’t understand?”
“It’s classified.”
“Does it have anything to do with David?” she blurted.
“It has everything to do with your husband, and you, and me--and every American in this camp. It has to do with
“War?” she said lightly. “That sounds ominous.”
More... Passionate Hearts: An Anthology of Love, Passion, and Romance
Marilyn Celeste Morris, multipublished author of The Women of Camp Sobingo and Forces of Nature, My Ashes of Dead Lovers Garage Sale, Sabbath’s Gift, and Sabbath’s House, with Vanilla Heart Publishing, has also published Sabbath’s Room, a supernatural mystery, and Once a Brat, part travelogue, part therapy session about her world-wide travels with her army officer father from her birth in 1938 to his (their) retirement in 1958.
She is the co-facilitator of the Fort Worth Lupus Support Group, North Texas Chapter, Lupus Foundation of America and counsels newly diagnosed persons and their families about the ravages of systemic lupus erythematosus. She has taped various radio interviews, such as Artist First, local cable television programs, most recently Sizzlin’Seniors on Comcast Television and is accustomed to speaking to groups on the subject of lupus. Being involved in the military brats communities, the Lupus Foundation and her children and grandchildren are her passions.
She has a black cat named Cleopatra, or, rather, Cleopatra has Marilyn! Marilyn says "Cleopatra is highly neurotic, but I love her anyway." When she can find the time in between her work and her writing work, her family and her involvement in her many organizations, Marilyn is a voracious reader, "reading almost anything," she says, and watching the Discovery Channel and History Channel.
No comments:
Post a Comment