Free In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke

you’ll still have time to back out!”
    Until after their honeymoon in Puerto Rico, he would continue to employ the nanny. Afterward, they would “see what the next step should be.”
    “If you want to quit, to be home with the children, of course that’s fine. If not —”
    If not, Jiselle knew, they would need to find another nanny.
    She had not met the present nanny, but when she’d called Mark’s house once, a bright-sounding young woman had answered and called out to Mark in singsong, “The phone’s for you!”
    “Where does she sleep?” Jiselle asked.
    “When I’m here,” he said, “she sleeps at her apartment in town. When I’m gone, I don’t know. The couch? Why would I care? I hope you’re not jealous. I’m not one of those widowers who’s so desperate he sleeps with his children’s nanny.”
    “Of course not!” Jiselle had said.
    Who knew better than she that Captain Mark Dorn could have any woman he wanted?
    Still, twice in two weeks, Jiselle had tried to make an appointment with her therapist to discuss the issue of quitting her job to take care of Mark’s children. She knew she could afford no fuzzy logic here, with her wedding only weeks away, but when she called Dr. Smitty Smith’s office, she got only his answering machine, on which he’d left a recording saying that his patients should leave a message, which he would return when he was over his illness.

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    T he chapel in which Jiselle had been baptized, the one they’d reserved for the wedding, was damaged by the flooding that started the first week of July, after the long week of relentless rain at the end of June, so Jiselle quickly reserved the small garden behind the restaurant, where the reception was to be held as well.
    Both events had to take place outdoors due to the new Health Department regulations requiring at least three months’ notice for an indoor gathering of more than thirty people. But the weather was terrible. After the rains, a thick humidity cloaked everything in more gray and stench. Some afternoons, the air was so thick and motionless that it felt like trying to breathe inside an aquarium. Mark and Jiselle decided to be married at twilight.
     
     
    The afternoon before the wedding, around four o’clock, Jiselle and her mother arrived at the garden behind the restaurant to check on the flowers and the tables and chairs, to make sure everything was in order and had arrived, along with the cooler of champagne.
    Jiselle had tried to call Mark earlier from her cell phone, but she couldn’t get a signal. She’d wanted to know how the children were. The night before, they’d gone out to dinner after the rehearsal, and Sam had thrown up at Jiselle’s mother’s feet. He’d been drinking 7-Up. Gallons of it. Every time he finished a large glass of it, the waitress had brought him another. Only Jiselle’s mother had been watching this, and later she said, “What do you expect, letting a child drink all that soda? Of course he’s going to throw up.”
    But when Jiselle spoke to Mark that morning, Sam seemed fine. Camilla, however, was lying down, complaining of menstrual cramps, and Sara had not yet broken the Vow of Silence, as Mark had begun to refer to it. She’d begun it the week Jiselle came to stay, and Jiselle knew, from sneaking a look at her diary, that she planned to continue:
    If he marries this stupid bitch, I’m going to make their lives a living hell.
    For one thing, I’m never going to say another word out loud to either of them as long as they live.
     
    After they’d supervised the raising of the canopy over the garden by Perfect Party Rentals, Jiselle and her mother went back to the house together to get dressed. Jiselle’s wedding dress, freshly laundered at BC-YU Cleaners, hung on the back of the door of her childhood bedroom, now her mother’s sewing room. It was draped in a clear plastic sheet emblazoned with a black cartoon caricature of a ninja soldier with the