My Three Husbands Read Online Free Page A

special prewedding kind of dinner thingie for us. For me and Tremaynne.”
    â€œA celebration.”
    â€œYeah. But he wouldn’t dress up, so I just told him to stay at home.”
    â€œAre you having second thoughts about marrying Tremaynne?” Mom asked.
    â€œWell, the first two turned out to be duds, didn’t they?”
    â€œMaybe three will be your lucky number.”
    To smoke, I had to stand outside on her teeny front porch. Mom stayed inside, behind the screen door, seated and listening like a priest in a confessional.
    â€œSometimes I think I have, like, absolutely no ability to judge character,” I said, trying to blow my smoke away. The breeze blew it right into the house. Mom coughed. “It’s, like, I’ll believe anything a guy tells me.”
    â€œWell, you essentially trust people, sweetheart. You assume they’re always telling the truth.”
    â€œThey act one way when they want to fuck you and then turn into something else afterward.”
    â€œTremaynne seems more . . . intelligent than either Sean or Peter,” Mom observed. “Or JD for that matter. But he seems shy. He doesn’t share a lot.”
    â€œHe doesn’t trust people.”
    â€œOh. Well, when you lose your trust—” Mom said vaguely.
    I flicked my cigarette out toward the street and lit another. The caffeine from that last double espresso at the restaurant zoomed through my veins. I wanted to be out on a dance floor. I wanted to be happy. I wanted never to end up like Mom.
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    Tremaynne was sleeping when I got home. He’d left all the candles burning, which meant he wanted to make love.
    Once he came down from that tree, after spending three months in it, it’s like that’s all he wanted to do. It never got boring. Tremaynne said he loved my body, and he proved it every time we fucked. I faked orgasms with my first two husbands. I didn’t fake them with Tremaynne. I never fantasized that he was Ethan Hawke or Leonardo DiCaprio.
    But tonight I was still pissed off with him for not going out to dinner with me and the dads. I crouched down beside the futon and looked at his sleeping face, the wispy goatee, the long eyelashes, the oh-so-kissable lips. His warm, earthy smell seeped up from the tangled bedclothes.
    I thought: This man will always tell the truth. This man will never compromise his principles. This man will never wear cologne (maybe not even deodorant). This man is dedicated to being natural.
    All that was good.
    Then, suddenly, I had a glimpse of the future. Our future. I thought: I will never see this man dressed up in a drop-dead suit. This man will never shine at one of the dads’ big parties. This man will never take me out to a hip restaurant or on a trip to Venice. This man will never play the status game, so we’ll never have a pretty house or a cool car or stainless-steel appliances. This man is part Teflon: He won’t let my middle-class fantasies stick to him.
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    Tremaynne was an alternative media star when I met him. He was famous because he’d spent three months living in a tree in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon. It was a grove of old-growth redwoods that some lumber company wanted to cut down.
    He joined a group called Arbor Vitae. This group did everything it could to stop the logging. They spiked trees, damaged equipment, and chained themselves to tree trunks. Then Tremaynne volunteered to actually live in one of the oldest and largest of the threatened redwoods. The lumber people were so pissed off with Arbor Vitae they wanted to kill everyone in the group. Especially Tremaynne.
    Living 180 feet up in a tree was the kind of publicity stunt that Tremaynne knew would draw attention to the cause. He looked like a movie star when he was on the news. Like Brad Pitt without the jaw line. A local station covered the story and I just happened to see it one night when I was at my mom’s.