Free The Crasher by Shirley Lord

for Southwestern art?
    Ginny looked at her watch. This was turning into a fiasco. She leaned forward anxiously. “Is there any other way you can go?
     To get out of this traffic?”
    The driver growled something unintelligible, and for the first time Ginny realized he was wearing a turban. Just her luck
     to get a Sikh off the boat from India.
    Now she was getting worried about the taxi meter. She’d estimated it wouldn’t cost a cent more than twenty bucks from Queens
     to Bryant Park, where for the first time some of theNew York shows were being held in a huge tent pitched beside the New York Public Library. Every time she glanced away for
     a second, she could swear the meter shot up another dollar.
    Although he didn’t know it, Alex was the one who’d decided her to take the plunge and try to crash the Klein show today, because
     he’d told her he was going to be there. A tad condescendingly, she thought, he’d promised to tell her “all about it.” Was
     he in for a big surprise.
    “What you wear says a lot about who you are—or want to be—and so does the way you arrive wearing it. Even Grace Kelly had
     to be taught how to emerge ‘flawlessly’ (Ginny loved that word) from car or carriage.” She had never forgotten Alex telling
     her that. It was the reason that today, a walking fashion statement, she’d splurged on a cab.
    Thank God for Alex. He’d always been her biggest booster, even when she thought she might have gone too far. “Pushing the
     envelope”—that’s how he described her most daring designs—although he didn’t hesitate to be a severe critic, too.
    A reefer coat she’d made that terrible summer in Boston, out of a new bath towel, had received one of his more scathing comments,
     and not just because he knew she’d got into such trouble at home. Her mother had told her, with an almost bare linen closet,
     if she wanted to take a shower in the future, she’d have to dry herself with the coat!
    Her father didn’t like Alex. Even if they didn’t see him for weeks and sometimes, to her despair, months, every time Alex
     called to say he was in the vicinity, her father made the same cracks. “He’s too smooth for his own good” or “He’s always
     on to something,” accompanied by a sour expression which spoke volumes, despite the fact that Alex was the only child of his
     beloved sister, Ginny’s Aunt Lil.
    That was where part of the problem lay, for Lil, or Lillian, as her father always called his sister, had worked for the Walker
     School in its early days in California. When it started to move around the country she’d quit, saying she couldn’t uproot
     with a young son to take care of. Her father had apparentlyalways blamed Alex for losing his sister’s services, which just showed what a cockeyed way he had of looking at things.
    It was peculiar and cruel, Ginny thought, considering what a sad early life Alex had had, having lost his father in a car
     crash when he was only two or three.
    Years ago, one wonderful summer when they’d just arrived in Denver, Alex had arrived in a red sports car, all grown up, tall,
     dark and handsome, there to “help out” at the Walker School himself. At least that’s how Ginny dimly remembered her father
     describing it. Far more clearly, she remembered their disagreements over “the content and substance of the courses” and one
     morning she’d woken up to find Alex gone. She’d been brokenhearted, but it was only the first of many rumpuses between her
     father and his nephew, and after a while things calmed down and, thank God, Alex would once again pop back into their lives.
     As far as Ginny was concerned, it always seemed just in time to guide her in the right direction.
    Without Alex’s input, for instance, she wouldn’t have gone so quietly to business school. Both her parents knew that.
    They’d been sitting round the dining table in Queens that fall of ‘91, still surrounded by unpacked boxes, in their usual