Читать книгу No Groom Like Him - Jeanie London, Jeanie London - Страница 16

LILY DROVE DOWN Main Street with the noon traffic in her dad’s Cadillac, which she’d commandeered as her own until arranging for a rental. Downtown Poughkeepsie had come a long way since the days when she and her friends used to sneak into town to hang out at the Main Mall and ogle boys. The pedestrian mall had been built to preserve the nineteenth-century commercial buildings that lined the town’s main street. While it had been a noble endeavor, the inception of suburban shopping centers had degenerated Main Mall into a seamy place that had fascinated teens from the rural hamlet of Pleasant Valley.

Main Mall had met its official demise only a few years before Lily’s last visit home. The street had since been reopened and all those commercial buildings were now on the historic register.

Her own building had undergone a similar transformation, and as she turned onto a side street and found a parking space, she remembered how this row of Victorian town houses hadn’t looked nearly so well-preserved a decade ago. But to the twenty-year-old college student with very big dreams, the three-story town house, with its mansard roof and dormer windows, had been the epitome of worldliness and charm.

As the property had needed considerable work and everyone had believed the demise of the Main Mall inevitable, she’d purchased it for a song. Then, with the help of her father, brothers and friends, she’d undertaken the renovations of the interior and exterior herself.