Free The Time of Her Life by Robb Forman Dew Page A

anyway.
    “I’ve never seen a real nun,” Jane said. “I can’t remember if the nuns in TV shows wear glasses or not. What should I go as?
     I don’t think I can go as a nun, too. We have to go as a family. I mean we have to dress as a group. Something that all three
     of us could be.”
    Avery still worked with the wire frames of the glasses, holding the four abandoned lenses in his palm, but he looked startled.
     He was clearly taken aback, and he didn’t say anything for a minute until he had adjusted the frames to his satisfaction,
     and he held them out to show Jane. He had bent the frame of each eyepiece into a shape that was pointed at its center but
     then curved outward on either side to the bottom edge, which went straight across.
    “Gothic arches,” he said, and he put on a pair so she could see how they would look. The points of the arches reached the
     middle of his eyebrows; it was a nice effect. He was abstracted, though, and forgot to take them off.
    “The child of two nuns… let’s see… what could two nuns possess? Not chastity. That wouldn’t be any good, would it? That would
     be pretty predictable. What about virtue? That would be right, don’t you think? You think that would work?” He looked very
     concerned as he studied her through the empty wire-rimmed glasses.
    “Oh, yeah. That’s good,” said Jane, although she wasn’t sure about this idea at all; she wasn’t sure she understood it.
    He took off the glasses and folded down the earpieces with care, leaving the price tag on for the checkout girl. “We could
     do that with a white sheet. We need a ribbon, though, and some paint. Gold.” Her father was lost in his idea, and she followed
     along behind him while he bought three yards of stiff wide purple ribbon and two yards of plain black cotton fabric for Claudia’s
     veil. He finally found some metallic gold paint in the craft section next to the macramé materials.
    That evening after Avery had brought home dinner for them all from the drive-through at Burger Chef, he and Claudia fashioned
     a flowing white robe for Jane from a twin-sized sheet. From shoulder to waist, Miss America style, they pinned the purple
     ribbon on which Claudia had painted in the shiny gold paint “ OUR OWN REWARD .” At the party that night, when Jane and Diana were by themselves, Diana pressed her about this costume, but Jane was disdainful.
    “I’m Virtue, Diana. If you don’t understand it, you just don’t have any sense of humor. Virtue is its own reward, you see!”
     She was so snappish that Diana didn’t argue. She and her family had dressed as Mouseketeers, with Mickey Mouse hats from the
     dime store. Another family had come as Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, and they had dressed their four-year-old daughter
     as Sandy, the dog, but they had taken her home early to stay with a sitter. Some people had not dressed in costume at all.
     There was a man in a leopard-printed bathing suit with a woman in a sarong, and Jane finally figured out that they were Tarzan
     and Jane. All in all, though, she thought her own parents had come up with the most interesting costumes.
    She and Diana sat in on the grown-ups’ party for a little while, and Jane watched the couples dancing and thought that her
     parents looked wonderful and exotic, swaying across the room together with their robes flowing around their legs and their
     veils swinging behind them. When Avery had come to get Jane to dance with him, she had been thoroughly glad to be connected
     with her father and her mother. She listened to her father being clever and pleased with the things he said. WhenMaggie said to him that his costume was ingenious and asked whatever had made him think of it, he had grinned at her wholeheartedly.
    “What could be more appropriate? I’ve taken the veil to save my family from disgrace. Now I can confess and go to heaven!
     It’s your costume that is ingenious, Maggie,” he said. “I wouldn’t