Mixed Blessings

Chapter One The sky was a brilliant blue, and the day was hot and still as Diana Goode stepped out of the limousine with her father. The angles of her face were softer than usual beneath a haze of creamy ivory veil, and the heavy satin dress whooshed softly as the driver helped her out and settled it around her. She beamed at her father, standing outside the church, and then she closed her eyes, trying to remember absolutely every detail of the moment. She had never been this happy in her life. Everything was perfect. "You look beautiful," her father said softly, with All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena rising behind her. Her mother had gone ahead in the other car with her sisters and their husbands and children. Diana was the middle child, classically striving to be better, smarter, more successful. She loved her sisters with a deep, solid affection, and yet she always felt she had to do something more than they did. Not that they had set such impossible standards. Her oldest sister, Gayle, had been set on going to medical school, until she met her husband in her first year of premed, married him that June, and instantly got pregnant. At twenty-nine, she had three adorable little girls of her own now. Gayle was two years older than Diana, and although they were close, there had always been a sense of rivalry between them, and the two women were astoundingly different. Gayle never looked back at a career in medicine once. She was happily married, and satisfied to stay home with her girls, and keep busy with them and her husband. She was the perfect doctor's wife, intelligent, informed, and completely understanding about his hours as an obstetrician. They were planning to have at least one more child, Gayle had confided to her a few weeks before. Jack was desperate for a boy now. Gayle's whole life revolved around her husband, and her children, and their home. For her, the world of careers held absolutely no appeal, unlike her two younger sisters. In some ways, Diana had more in common with her younger sister, Sam. Samantha was ambitious, competitive, excited about being out in the world, and for the first couple of years she was married, she had desperately tried to juggle both home life and career. But when her second child was born thirteen months after the first, a mere two years after she'd gotten married, she admitted that she just couldn't do it. She quit her job at an art gallery in L.A. and decided to stay home, which was welcome news to her husband. Although for months after she'd quit, Sam felt disappointed not to be working. In the two years they'd been married, Seamus's work had begun to be recognized and admired, and he was slowly becoming one of L.A.'s most successful young contemporary artists. Sam did free-lance design work from home, but even that was almost impossible to do, with no help and two very young children. She adored being home with Seamus and her babies, and they had a great marriage, and their son and daughter were two little fat cherubs. Everyone who saw them instantly loved them. But still, there were times when she envied Diana's place in the working world, among "grown-ups," as she put it. But in Diana's eyes, her sisters' lives seemed so settled. As far as she could see, at twenty-five and twenty-nine, her sisters seemed to have everything they wanted. Sam was happy and at ease in the world of modern art, Gayle was equally so as the wife of a doctor. But Diana had always wanted so much more than they had. She had gone to Stanford, and then did her junior year abroad, in Paris, at the Sorbonne. And she had returned to Paris for yet another year there after graduation. She had found a fabulous little apartment on the rue de Grenelle, on the Left Bank, and for a while she had decided that she really was going to stay there. But after a year and a half working forParis-Match,she gSteel, Danielle is the author of 'Mixed Blessings' with ISBN 9780440214113 and ISBN 0440214114.