My Best Man by Andy Schell (top 10 novels TXT) 📕

“It’s not that simple. I have to stay married and living with my ii wife for a minimum of ten years. If I get divorced before that, my inherited assets, and any profits from their investment, are. deemed immediately receivable by the family estate.”

“There’s always a way around these things,” she says confidently, as if she practices law.

“There’s never a way around my father,” I caution.

She thinks. For longer than usual. And just when it appears has something serious to say, she changes tack and sounds as as my mother. “So we’ll stay married for ten years.”

“Amity, that’s a huge commitment.”

She sits up, takes my hand. “Why? Why should anything any different than it is right now? You have your lovers, I mine. And, well, considering Padre Island, sometimes we might even have each other.” She finishes the last statement with her eyebrow arcing nearly into her hairline.

She’s right. It would be a prosperous honest arrangement. But I have to ask, “What’s in it for you?”

She cocks her head, gives me the demure Amity. “Why, Harry, have I ever bullshit ted you about my tastes? Bubba, I don’t want your fortune. That’s yours. But I meant it when I said I love you on Padre Island. And if I get to spend the next ten years hanging out with a wonderful guy who makes me laugh and buys me a few pretty dresses and a first-class ticket to Pads along the way, then I consider myself lucky. I don’t want your money.”

“What about having a life, Amity? What about a real husband? Don’t you want to fall in love, marry some great guy, have children?”

Her face sobers, her eyes lock into mine. “No. I don’t. Those aren’t my dreams, Harry.”

“I don’t know. I guess I never planned on having all those things. And I know I could never get married to a man, because that doesn’t happen in America. But I do have my dreams, and I kind of hope that one day I’ll find a nice guy, settle down, get a house.”

“I’m a nice guy. We have a house. So bring your boyfriends over!”

“You are a nice guy, and this is a great house. It would just be a pretty big step to get married even if we do love each other. Shit, my father sure has given me a lot to think about.”

Amity pats my leg and rises from the sofa. “Well, I think we should at least get engaged. You’ve got to get these bill collectors off our porch!”

CHAPTER

TWELVE

ur flight is about to land in Wichita. Amity is still in lavatory of the jet. I’ve never seen her like this, so nervous. When she returns to her seat, her hair is larger than ever. Her perfume pungent. Her lips shiny. It’s like opening night, and she’” sweating it out before the curtain goes up.

At the gate, my mom and the general are waiting. When sees us, Mother raises her arms and beams like the Statue of Liberty. Her doctors believe that they got all the cancer and that she’ll have a complete recovery. She looks wonderfully alive in her peach colored linen suit. Donald yells, “Hey!” but with his accent I imagine he’s saying, “Hay?” Then, before we come any closer, my mother has a camera and is snapping photos.

Dressed in her little red-and-black Talbot’s ensemble, her linked in mine, Amity shines it on. As I escort her out into the terminal, the camera’s electronic flash popping over and over, smiles like a movie star, and everyone in the gate area of the Wichita Mid-Continent Airport stares at her as if she’s the most beautiful and glamorous thing they’ve ever seen. And at that moment, I wish Brian Manes, that dumb-ass wrestler in high school who hassled me to no end and called me a faggot every day of school for three years, could see me now. But since he’s

not here, it’s satisfaction enough to know that he’ll never get a blow job like the one I got.

“Harry!” my mother says, grabbing my face in her hands and kissing my cheek. She turns to Amity and reaches out her hand. “Amity dear.” Amity shakes and smiles and nauce to meet yew’s my mom, and my mother turns to me and nods with an impressed look on her face. Of course I could have wheeled Karen Ann Quinlan out on a gurney and my mother would have thought, “What a delightful girl. Nonsense about this coma thing she’s just thinking.”

Amity offers a handshake to Donald, who holds her hand a little longer than my mother does, and then a little longer still. Donald then shakes my hand and slaps me so hard on the back that I cough up a piece of lung.

We exit through the sliding glass doors of the terminal into the muggy summer air brimming with the smell of earth and wheat. It’s sunny and hot. The puffy clouds serve only as decoration to the unrelenting Kansas sky. Donald has parked illegally in the holding area for hotel vans. I used to park there, five years before, when I was home from college for the summer, and working a piddly-ass job for pocket change by driving a van for the Sheraton Airport Hotel while Winston apprenticed at a downtown investment firm. I’d wait for the Braniff hostesses in their Halston uniforms to appear from the terminal so that I could whisk them away to their hotel jail cells. Haughty sky goddesses. They never tipped, which is why, now that I’m a flight attendant, no matter how poor I am, I tip double.

Donald wheels the Cadillac out of the airport and points it east, onto the flat infinity of Highway 54. The farmland outskirts of the city are soon replaced with rows of small brick houses and too many architecturally uninspired, single-storied, round churches with big brown crosses on their roofs. I’m never sure what the denomination of each