Free Mating Rituals of the North American WASP by Lauren Lipton

See you
     at the party!”
    Miss Abigail held on to her smile until Ernestine was well down the sidewalk. “I’ll be introducing you at a small reception,
     dear, next Sunday afternoon. I presume your family is in New York? I’d like to invite them—your parents and brothers and sisters.”
    Peggy imagined the look on Miss Abigail’s face when Max and Madeleine Adams parked their RV in Silas Ebenezer Sedgwick’s driveway.
     “I’m an only child. We’re from Northern California, but right now my parents are traveling. They’d love to be here otherwise.”
    It wasn’t entirely false. Peggy’s father had been a middle manager for a California department store chain and had moved from
     town to town, assignment to assignment, when the mood struck. Peggy had spent her last two years of high school, anyway, in
     Northern California. And her parents
were
traveling; a few years ago, Max had cashed in his retirement nest egg to finance his dream of crisscrossing the West in perpetuity
     in a recreational vehicle. Peggy suspected her parents’ lifestyle choice would not sit well with Miss Abigail. It didn’t sit
     well with Peggy, though the RV wasn’t what bothered her—it was that their future was too precarious, too uncertain.
    “Let’s go inside.” Miss Abigail started toward the house, her steps short and slow across the leaf-scattered lawn.
    “Who’ll watch the flower stand?” Peggy considered volunteering to stay outside. Her decision to remain married to Luke was
     seeming hasty and foolish. She doubted she could keep up the charade for an hour, let alone a year. “That box isn’t locked.
     Anyone could walk off with your money.”
    “This isn’t New York City, dear.”
    Up close, the Silas Sedgwick House front door was even more imposing than it was from the car—perhaps nine feet tall and broader
     than a regular door, with a weathered brass knocker set squarely in the center, a good foot above Miss Abigail’s cotton candy
     head. But it also needed a paint job. Strips of black had peeled away, revealing bare wood underneath like the glimpse of
     shirt through the elbows of Luke’s shabby sweater.
    Miss Abigail threw her whole body against the door, and it creaked open. “Welcome,” she said, ushering Peggy inside.

    “Don’t tell me you don’t know what to say. You’re a writer. Or so you claim.” Nicki brandished her cell phone at Luke. “You
     know lots of words. How about these? ‘Stop. Leave me alone, bitch. I’m backing out.’ ”
    The couch opposite Nicki was littered with lacy pillows. Luke shoved them to one side and sat down. “I’m not backing out.”
     This scheme with Peggy was repugnant and unseemly and went against every fiber of his being. It was also the best thing to
     happen to the family finances in half a century—and, to Luke himself, ever. He’d been shocked at first at Peggy’s proposal
     and hung up summarily, but by morning he’d reversed his thinking and called her back. Hadn’t he dreamed his entire life of
     living someplace where no one knew his business back for generations? Hadn’t he longed to pursue his poetry, to break free
     of the Sedgwick name, to escape the ingrained notions of how to live, whom to be friends with, what to do? Now he could and,
     more crucially, ensure his great-aunt had the kind of medical care she deserved. “It’s a winning situation for all of us,”
     he told Nicki, sounding like one of the speakers at the Family Asset Management Conference.
    Nicki waved the phone at him. “What’s her number? I’ll call her myself.”
    “Put that down,” Luke said coolly. The third or fourth time he and Nicki had broken up, right here in her artist’s loft in
     South Norwalk, with its bohemian view of the New Haven line train trestle, she’d thrown her coffee at him. It had hit the
     back wall and splattered to the floor, ruining the weaving project Nicki had been working on at the time, a shawl-like garment
     fashioned from