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626 pages

English

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George and Arthur are identical twins, both are in college and living in late 1930s America. They come from a rich upper class Baltimore family. Their father had been taking the family on summer vacations to Miami Beach. Finding Miami Beach to be too crowded, the father changes directions and takes the family to a remote and less known vacation resort in South Carolina. There the boys meet and fall head over rich privileged heels in love with a beautiful local girl who works as a cleaning girl who cleans the rental vacation cottages. When they return the next year they start up a full blown love and sexual affair with the girl, Melissa. The girl falls in love with them; both of them. Both brothers want to marry the girl. The situation lead to quite a rivalry between the two brothers which could lead to a serious break between them in the family.
The problem is that Melissa said she wants to marry BOTH men. She says that she loves them both equally and cannot choose between them. In the end she refuses to choose between them saying that if they will not agree to a three-way marriage she will live with them both in a menage-a-twa arrangement anywhere. While that could be worked out in backwoods mountain country, it would be totally unacceptable in straight laced conservative Baltimore Brahmin society. The boys do not want to leave their family home and situation.
By a series of events that include a savage barroom between the brothers and locals over the girl, a fight in which one of the brothers seriously mutilates a knife welding redneck thug, facing possible serious danger from angry locals who falsely blame the girl for provoking the fight, the girl comes home with the boys to live with them as a cleaning girl in the family home in Baltimore, much to the chagrin of the boys straight laced mother. At home behind closed doors, the boys carry on in secret the affair they started in Carolina. At their sister's wedding reception both of the brothers propose to the girl with the one she does not choose agreeing to drop out of the picture. Sill as much of a stubborn hillbilly girl as she was when they first met her, Melissa again refuses to choose between them. The issue unresolved as ever, the affair otherwise continues in secret at the family house. The years roll on, Melissa marries out of necessity, but which one did she choose? Find out how this convoluted love affair ends.

Sujets

Policier & Thriller

Thriller

Romance policière

Action

Fiction

Romance

Adventure

Informations

Publié par	AuthorHouse
Date de parution	14 décembre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781665578196
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

My Melissa
Robert Beatty

AuthorHouse™
1663 Liberty Drive
Bloomington, IN 47403
www.authorhouse.com
Phone: 833-262-8899

© 2023 Robert Beatty. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/13/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7820-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7818-9 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-6655-7819-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022923265

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
1
“You could see it in their eyes,” the old woman said to the young girl standing next to her behind the antique desk spread with aged pictures taken from the old-fashioned picture box. In a small vignette that crossed more than one generation and touched back upon lives being lived and no longer living, the child looked at the picture the old woman touched with seeming reverence.
“You could always tell the difference between them by looking into their eyes. They tried to play games with me by not telling me which one of them was which or by pretending to be each other. But they didn’t fool me. In life, I fooled myself all over the place, up, back down, and sideways, but they never fooled me. I could tell which one of them it was just by looking in their eyes. I could tell what was on their minds just by looking into their eyes. I knew their minds.
“They both said my mind was a mystery to them. Arthur said I didn’t know my own mind; George said I knew my mind all too well. It was just that to him, what he knew of my mind, what I thought in my mind, and what I determined in my head didn’t make sense to anybody outside of me. He thought that what I took for sense was ninety-nine percent stubbornness.
“He didn’t say that to me in so many words, but I knew he thought it. It wouldn’t have made any difference if he had said it to my face and lectured me all hollow with it. I would have been just as stubborn. They both tried to advise me where they thought I needed to be counseled. But the only advice I ever took was my own. Going about life on my own terms and on my own mind and will, sometimes I wonder how I lasted as long as I have. If it weren’t for them, most likely I probably wouldn’t have lasted near as long as I have.”
The old woman looked back at the one picture she was touching. Though the child wasn’t old enough to put it into fully developed thought, in her maturing mind, from the way the old woman spoke and touched the picture, somehow it seemed to the child that, to the old woman, the pictures somehow contained the essence of her life.
“They each had a different look in their eyes. The average person couldn’t see it, but I could. Maybe I just had country-girl instincts about deep things and a good country eye for subtle differences. Maybe the reason I knew them so well and so deep was because I loved them both equally and equally deeply.”
Though she was not quite old enough yet to formulate it into mature words, to the young girl, the old woman spoke with the quiet certainty of one who has been through a long, involved, and possibly painful life journey. Though it was farther from the child’s ability to put into words, the old woman spoke with the voice of one who also knew the end of their long journey was not far off.
“People think identical twins are both the same on the inside and the outside,” the old woman went on. “They believe that twins not only look the same but think exactly the same, that they’re duplicate copies of each other. I suppose there’s something to that. But it’s not a hard-and-fast rule of nature that they do. I know from having known and loved both of them that they didn’t think exactly the same.”
The old woman moved her hand on the pictures. “Like the pictures they took at the wedding.”
The tips of the old woman’s fingers tapped as she touched the time-frozen figures in the picture. When her fingers weren’t tapping, the old woman ran them over the three faces in the picture. At first glance, some people might have mistaken the tapping of the old woman’s hand for the rhythmical neurological twitching that old people often develop. But even the young child could instinctively recognize by the way the old woman touched the picture and ran her fingers over the faces in the picture that it was a gesture of affection.
The old woman pushed a little harder with her finger down on the picture under her hand. The added pressure stopped the tapping.
“The wedding photographers took all kinds of pictures the day of their sister’s wedding back in 1939 and at the reception after. This picture of us was taken at the reception. I had never had my picture taken before that night. When they snapped the picture, the flash was so bright I thought I had been blinded. It was other things I was blind about at the time, especially about myself.”
The woman tapped the picture again. “Even back then they took a lot of pictures at weddings and made lots of copies. The more copies they made, the more they could talk you into buying. They made dozens of pictures of Margo in her wedding dress and of her and her French husband together in their wedding outfits. They made a whole bunch of copies of a lot of the usual wedding pictures. I don’t know what happened to most of those copies. I guess they all were given away after the wedding or were thrown out over the years. All I have of most pictures from the wedding is a single copy.”
The old woman flipped the picture over. On the reverse side of the picture, the child could see a square-shaped block of faded letters that looked like they had been stamped or typed on the back of the picture. Mixed in with the block-type letters were handwritten words.
The old woman pointed to a number two that had been written at the bottom of the block. “You see that number two? That means they made only two prints of this picture. I asked the photographer to make two copies, one for each of them. I didn’t know that George was going to take one of them along with him when he disappeared. The other copy has been missing as long as your great-uncle has.”
The child had spent the opening years of her life in a world where all photos, digital and otherwise, were normally in color. And still pictures themselves were a bit archaic. In the era the child had been born into, most family memories were recorded on video that moved and showed the life it recorded in the motion it had actually been lived in. That the picture was not only a still picture but was also black-and-white only emphasized for the child how old and long-gone the other era was. Both the woman and pictures were now the only remaining tangible evidence of her memory of people and affections long gone. However much of the memories might still be alive and in motion in the old woman’s mind. For the child, the pictures seemed