The Newlyweds Read Online Free Page B

heirloom—it had belonged to Eileen and Cathy’s mother—and so of course she could see how Cathy resented it going to Amina.
    “That looks so lovely on your hand,” Eileen had said, perhaps because she’d noticed Cathy staring, too. She turned to her sister: “George had to take it down two sizes, and I always thought Mother’s fingers were thin.”
    “Eileen and I always said it would go to George when he married,” Cathy informed Amina. “He was the boy. Even if Kim were going to marry”—she gave a short, barking laugh—“and I’ve given up hope,
she
wouldn’t wear something like that. A blood diamond, she called it.”
    “It’s an antique,” George said. “You can’t put it back in the ground.”
    “Exactly,” Cathy had said, smiling tightly. “That’s what I would’ve told her.”
    Aunt Cathy and her husband, an alcoholic and a “deadbeat dad,” had divorced soon after they’d adopted Kim, and so Cathy had raised her daughter almost entirely on her own. Because she couldn’t rely on Kim’s adoptive father for money, she’d started her own business washing other people’s dogs. That had seemed to Amina like a poor, almost Deshi sort of enterprise—something you invented with your own hands because you didn’t have any other capital. But George said that Cathy didn’t wash the dogs herself: she had three trucks and six Cuban employees who traveled around Rochester from house to house.
    Amina had been extremely eager to meet Kim, not only to thank her for prompting George to look online for a mate, but simply because George’s cousin sounded so interesting. She’d been disappointed to learn that Kim was away when she arrived and wouldn’t be back until just before the wedding. Aunt Cathy and George had both apologized profusely for Kim’s absence, though in different ways.
    “You don’t know where she’s going to be on any given day,” Aunt Cathy had said, during one of the dinners at Eileen’s beautifully appointed table. Since there were only four of them, they ate in the breakfast nook, which was wallpapered in a pattern of red and blue sprigs that also matched Eileen’s china cups and dishes. George’s mother was a good cook and always remembered to make something separate for Amina, if there was pork in any of the dishes.
    “Are you allergic?” Aunt Cathy had asked the first time this had happened, and George had explained that Muslims, like Jews, didn’t eat pork.
    “Oh, I can see how it would be dirty over there. You wouldn’t want to eat any meat, would you? But our pork is very clean. As clean as chicken—next time, you’ll tell Eileen she doesn’t have to bother.”
    George’s mother said then that it was no trouble to take a piece of chicken out of the freezer for Amina, but Amina’s dietary restrictions had already gotten Cathy started on the subject of her own daughter.
    “You can hardly cook a meal for her anymore,” Cathy complained.“No meat at all, no fish. She doesn’t even eat eggs. And the last time I saw her, no onions. Can you believe that?
Onions?
”
    “Why doesn’t Kim eat onions?” Amina asked.
    “Something to do with yoga,” George said.
    “When I think about what she was like as a little girl—that white-blond hair, big green eyes, the longest lashes you’ve ever seen. And so well behaved! People used to stop us on the street, ask if I wanted her to be in commercials. I’ll tell you—that’s hardly what you’d get if you tried to adopt today. Little Chinese girls everywhere, and now people are even taking them from Africa.”
    “When did you see Kim last?” Eileen asked.
    “I can hardly remember! These places she goes—you don’t even know what country she’s in, one day to the next.” Cathy turned to Amina. “That’s the definition of torture for a mother. I hope you never experience it.”
    “Kim’s at a yoga-training course in Costa Rica,” George told Amina. “She’s getting some kind of advanced