Two of a Kind
Page 1
Praise for
Two of a Kind
“Yona Zeldis McDonough is at her best with Two of a Kind, a sumptuous romantic feast of missed opportunities on the road to true love. Whether you take this to the beach or curl up with it on a rainy day, this hilarious and heartwarming story will give you hours of reading pleasure.”
—Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of The Shoemaker’s Wife
“A beautiful and heartfelt novel, Two of a Kind tells of the unexpected love that blossoms between a most unlikely duo. With an exquisite eye for detail, McDonough pulls you into her characters’ world and keeps you rooting for them until the final page. If you’ve ever longed for a second—or third—chance, this book’s for you.”
—Camille Noe Pagán, author of The Art of Forgetting
“Tightly and beautifully plotted, with such winning characters. A compelling and moving novel.”
—Gregory Murphy, author of Incognito
“A deeply touching and romantic exploration of the joys and complications of falling in love the second time around. Christina and Andy’s journey to navigate the waters of new love and blended families always rings true; you’ll root for McDonough’s winning characters from the very start.”
—Erika Marks, author of The Guest House
“With grace, sensitivity, and humor, but pulling no punches, Two of a Kind explores the trickiest of relationships—both romantic and parental—immersing readers in the lives of four people over the course of a year. In deft and captivating prose, these characters quickly become as real as your neighbors, your friends, your family, as they finally face losses they’ve tried to forget, learn to live in the present, and ultimately face their futures together with the greatest healer of all: love.”
—Sharon Short, author of My One Square Inch of Alaska
“McDonough takes readers on an intriguing ride throughout the New York area—Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Long Island—as she deftly brews a novel like a perfect cappuccino, with the ideal balance of substance and lip-smacking froth.”
—Sally Koslow, author of The Widow Waltz
Written by today’s freshest new talents and selected by New American Library, NAL Accent novels touch on subjects close to a woman’s heart, from friendship to family to finding our place in the world. The Conversation Guides included in each book are intended to enrich the individual reading experience, as well as encourage us to explore these topics together—because books, and life, are meant for sharing.
Visit us online at www.penguin.com.
Praise for
A Wedding in Great Neck
“A touching, airy novel that manages to meld the concerns of family members spanning four generations into a delightfully well-written story. Readers who enjoy Mary Kay Andrews and Nora Roberts will relate to the Silverstein family as it embraces the deep wells of emotion that seem to surface only at major family events. With an authorial voice that switches deftly between impulsive teen-speak and a stately matriarch’s flashbacks, McDonough’s skill is to be commended. A tender, clever story with emotional heft.”
—Booklist
“In prose as sparkling as a champagne toast, McDonough’s delicious new novel gathers together one extraordinary wedding, two complicated families, and then shows how a single day can change everything. A funny, moving look at the bonds of love, the ties of family, and the yearning for happily ever after.”
—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You
“In this delightful tale, Yona Zeldis McDonough limns the ups and downs of family life with a grace that brings to mind Cathleen Schine at her best. McDonough does not shirk the dark side, but her characters, as flawed as they may be, retain their humanity in the face of life’s slings and arrows. A wise and witty novel from an author at the top of her form.”
—Megan McAndrew, author of Dreaming in French
“Spirited, entertaining, and a delight to read, A Wedding in Great Neck offers a penetrating glimpse into the lives of one particular family, with its myriad shifting alliances, disappointments, and secrets.”
—Lucy Jackson, author of Posh
“Emotional and evocative, hilarious and harrowing, A Wedding in Great Neck is a must read for every mother and daughter who’ve ever dreamed of, fought over, and loved each other through a wedding day.”
—Pamela Redmond Satran, New York Times bestselling author of The Possibility of You
“Deftly handling a well-drawn ensemble cast of characters, A Wedding in Great Neck is a playful yet touching parsing of the tugs and tangles of familial bonds. This breezy novel offers the reader graceful writing while exploring contemporary suburban turf with an anthropologist’s sharp eye.”
—Sally Koslow, author of Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest
“Yona Zeldis McDonough is a born storyteller and her powers of perception are at full tilt in A Wedding in Great Neck. Beautifully structured around the secret longings and high emotions visited upon that special day, the book explores the fraught love between siblings, the rich wisdom of their elders, and shifting class values in one family. McDonough’s Wedding is a page-turner—you’ll feel as if you were there.”
—Laura Jacobs, author of Women About Town
“With her trademark wit and keen eye, Yona Zeldis McDonough has created a confection that is not only a page-turner but a poignant view of family life. This elegant novel is a must read for long-married wives and any woman who longs to be married. Book clubs will swoon.”
—Adriana Trigiani
“An interesting take on the wedding novel that doesn’t place the bride and groom at the center. Fans of women’s fiction about weddings and family drama are sure to enjoy.”
—Library Journal
ALSO BY YONA ZELDIS MCDONOUGH
A Wedding in Great Neck
NAL Accent
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA), 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.
First published by NAL Accent, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA)
Copyright © Yona Zeldis McDonough, 2013
Conversation Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA), 2013
Cover photos: chairs by Todd Pearson/Digital Vision/ Getty Images; woman © Olena Zaskochenko/Shutterstock Images; man © Vladimir Gjorgiev/Shutterstock Images.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
McDonough, Yona Zeldis.
Two of a kind/Yona Zeldis McDonough.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-101-62650-4
1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Interior decorators—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.C39T96 2013
813'.6—dc23 2013015546
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
Contents
Praise
Also by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
About the Author
Conversation Guide
Questions For Discussion
for Paul, one of a kind
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks and gratitude to Linda Bernstein, Deborah Flomenhaft, and Cathy Tharin for background information on the School of American Ballet, to Sally Schloss and Jennie Fields for showing me where to begin, to Tracy Bernstein for keeping me on track, and to Judith Ehrlich, my guiding light the whole way through.
ONE
Christina Connelly sat in the tent, waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin. Her fourteen-year-old daughter sat beside her; Jordan had never attended such a lavish event and was fairly popping with excitement. Her sleeveless dress with its scoop-necked bodice revealed her slender arms and accentuated her long neck; in it, she looked every bit the budding ballerina that she was.
Looking down at her own silk tweed sheath—an interweaving of tiny black and white flecks—and the single silver bangle on her wrist, Christina felt the familiar pinch of insecurity; this Great Neck crowd was a moneyed one, and around her sat thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes, shoes, and jewelry. Her work as an interior designer often put her in contact with people like this, and most of the time she was able to tamp down the old feeling of being insufficient, a beggar at the banquet, but sometimes it pushed through to the surface. Still, her own dress was Italian and couture, scored secondhand at one of her favorite charity haunts in the city—she was a brilliant secondhand shopper—and the Elsa Peretti bangle had come from Tiffany, a gift from her late husband, Will. She knew she didn’t look opulent, but she liked to think she was elegant in an understated sort of way. She sat up straighter, determined to focus on the service that was about to start.
The rest of the wedding party had already gathered—bridesmaids, immediate family members—and the dark, ruggedly handsome groom stood under the white, flower-covered canopy. Chuppah, Christina corrected herself. She had been to enough Jewish weddings to know the term. Then a slight current seemed to circulate among the guests, an energy like the moment the curtain went up at the theater, and yes, here was the bride, Angelica Silverstein, floating down the aisle on her father’s arm, her head, neck, and shoulders swathed in a froth of white netting.
“That dress!” breathed Jordan.
That dress, or at least what was visible of it, was a sumptuous gleam of heavy white satin; to Christina’s trained eye, it looked like upholstery fabric. When the pair reached the chuppah, Angelica’s father—who was not, she knew, the owner of this god-awful house and its surrounding property—gently moved the veil back to reveal the bride. A collective gasp rose; Christina’s small intake of breath was part of it. She had known, of course, that her client was a beauty; the months spent in her company, working on the redecoration of Angelica’s Riverside Drive apartment, had made that abundantly clear. But the radiant young woman who stood before the assembled guests still surprised her.
Christina blinked back the tears that gathered—sudden, stinging—in her eyes. It wasn’t just that Angelica was beautiful. It was also that she was so clearly, incandescently in love—with the groom, of course, but with everyone else too: her parents and grandmother, whom she looked upon with such sweetness, her nieces, siblings, bridesmaids, friends, the musicians, the guests—everyone seemed to be bathed in the transformative power of that emotion.
Christina had once been in love like that. She and Will had not had a posh affair like this—it had been just the two of them down at City Hall on Centre Street. She was a Catholic girl from Brooklyn and Will a Protestant from North Carolina. Instead of arguing over the ceremony—her father and the aunt who raised her would have campaigned, vigorously, for a wedding at St. Augustine’s on Sixth Avenue, where the family had gone for decades—Christina and Will had impulsively decided to just take care of it themselves. He’d worn a slightly rumpled summer suit and straw hat he’d bought on Chambers Street that morning; she wore a thrift shop dress—even then she was doing the secondhand thing—of white eyelet. But when they were pronounced man and wife, she had been every bit as rapturous as the woman now under the chuppah. Christina sniffed, and dabbed at her eyes with the white linen square that she kept tucked in her bag.
“Mom, are you all right?” Jordan asked.
“I’m fine,” said Christina, and when it looked like Jordan did not believe her, she added, “Really I am.” She gave Jordan’s shoulder a little squeeze before turning her attention back to the ceremony, which had just started.
First the rabbi spoke and then the bridal couple began reading passages from the Song of Songs, first in English and then in Hebrew. As Christina listened, she discreetly looked around. No expense had been spared at this wedding, from the elaborate tents to the lush garlands of white flowers with which they had been decorated. The wine served at the cocktail hour had been exquisite, the hors d’oeuvres sumptuous. And there was still a three-course dinner to follow. What a luxury it would be to have so much money to burn; Christina’s own habit of thrift had been ingrained for so long that she could not even imagine how that would feel.
Her attention settled on Angelica again. Just as the groom was about to place the ring on her finger, Christina heard the small but insistent noise of someone’s phone. An irritating little buzz, like a wasp or a bee, but still, it was a wedding—how rude! Her own phone had been switched off the minute she arrived. Christina turned, ready to impale the boor with a furious look. But the perpetrator—a man in his forties wearing an expensive, putty-colored suit—had already risen from his seat. As he hurried away, she distinctly heard him say, “How many centimeters?” The guests nearby looked annoyed too, though the man seemed oblivious; the phone remained glued to his ear. Christina stared at his receding form, wanting him to feel her wrath, even from a distance.
Fortunately, no one up at the chuppah seemed to have noticed and the exchange of rings, the kiss, the napkin-muffled crunch of glass—Christina was told it was a lightbulb, not a goblet—went smoothly. When the service was over, she steered Jordan toward the receiving line. Jordan had been as taken by the entire spectacle as her mother was. “When I get married, I’m going to have a reception exactly like this,” she said, gesturing at the plush green expanse of lawn and, beyond that, the magnificent rose garden where the cocktail reception had been held.
Christina knew that day was still far off in the future. Right now, almost all of Jordan’s attention was focused on the classes she took at the Scho
ol of American Ballet on West Sixty-fifth Street. Boys, other than as possible dance partners, were not on her radar.
When they reached the bride and groom, hugs and kisses were exchanged. Angelica exclaimed over Jordan—How she’s grown! What gorgeous posture!—and the two women made noises about getting together. Although Angelica’s apartment was technically finished, their relationship had shifted from one that was purely professional to one bordering on friendship.
After the receiving line, it was time for dinner. Jordan went off to sit at the teens’ table, along with Angelica’s twin nieces and several of the groom’s relatives. Christina stood watching; she did have such perfect posture, and such a perfect dancer’s body too. Only maybe that body was just a little too thin these days; from the back, she seemed positively gaunt. Christina considered this as she made her way to her assigned table. Urging Jordan to eat never worked; the more she pressed, the greater her daughter’s resistance. And Christina understood the pressures Jordan faced. The world of classical ballet was ferociously competitive, and maintaining a lean, attenuated line was essential to success. Jordan didn’t have an eating disorder; she was just responding to the harsh demands of her chosen field.
As other people were finding their seats, exchanging greetings, hugs, and kisses, Christina reached her table, where she admired the etched glass water pitchers and crystal goblets that sparkled against the heavy white tablecloths. Each bone china place setting was adorned with a place card of heavy white vellum that was encircled by a few smooth white stones. She picked one up and held it in her hand: a nice touch. Although her business dealt strictly in interiors and the antiques with which she often filled them, she could still appreciate and admire the work of another talented professional. The flowers in the centerpiece—a cluster of white roses, freesia, lilies, and gardenias—spilled up and over the sides of the glass vase, giving it a natural, unstudied elegance.
“Too much white; it’s like being lost in a snowdrift.”