My Best Man by Andy Schell (unputdownable books .txt) 📗

stomach the thought of giving up all that money and being poor.” She then yelled up to the soloist, “Darlin’! This is going to be the longest walk of my

life. I know we planned the song for last, but I need you to go ahead and sing it now to kind of fill in until I make it out of here.”

The accompanist started the up-tempo introduction on the piano. Amity looked me square in the eye, kissed me on the lips, and said, ” “Bye, Harry. Love your guts!” She then tossed the taffy into her mouth and walked down the aisle while the soloist sang Cole Porter “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” And as I looked at the check in my hands, I saw that she had endorsed it payable to me. She’d signed over the whole two million as soon as she’d gotten it from Winston.

I realized right then I’d underestimated her from beginning to end. And more than a few years passed before I realized why: I’d been so intent on holding my cards close, working every angle, manufacturing myself a preferred outcome, all the things I’d accused her of that I’d lost my own heart along the way, as well as the hearts of everyone around me. We really were a lot alike, Amity and I. It wasn’t until we gave it all up the wedding charade, the money, the resentment of being born into our families and just offered to love each other honestly that we started down the paths that would take each of us home.

To be sure, there were some bumps along those paths. Of course, after I signed the wedding check back over to Amity, she went on a clothes shopping and cocaine spree that nearly killed her. But I, Jackie, and Nicolo (who abruptly changed his opinion of her) stood by her as she went through her fourth rehabilitation program. This time, it was the Betty Ford Center, which I think motivated her by the very fact that she admired Mrs. Ford and her fairy tale life as First Lady which Amity learned wasn’t a fairy tale at all or the Betty Ford Center wouldn’t exist. But it was definitely worth it for her to complete the program because it helped her to understand herself and be done with the drugs, and she got a chance to see

Liza Minelli without any makeup on. “She’s kind of horsy,” Amity wrote to me in a letter, “but she’s real sweet.”

For the next several years, Nicolo and I continued to live in Dallas, where he worked as a political reporter for the Dallas Morning News. I didn’t go to law school, but opted to attend veterinary school after returning to undergraduate school to pick up my needed prerequisites. It was many years before Winston divulged the owner of Cinnamon, and even inheriting all my money didn’t assuage his anger at Amity for duping him. So working with animals was my way of sublimating my yearnings for contact with my horse.

As the decade moved on, we all became increasingly aware of how powerful the HIV virus was and how AIDS would alter our lives forever. I was so casual, so careless, so cavalier that year I spent with Amity. And lucky. I didn’t have safe sex with anyone and I’m sure Amity didn’t either yet we both came out of it unscathed. Winston, sadly enough, contracted HIV in 1989. I was shocked, because by 1989 we all knew how to protect ourselves. But sex is a powerful thing even more powerful than my omnipotent brother. His own cavalier approach to life was quickly commuted when faced with mortality. At first, he rebuffed my overtures. But as his term unrolled with prickly caution, each day becoming a lifetime, he let his edges soften enough to be approached. We formed ourselves a workable brotherhood, and though our interests were unlike, we made the effort to connect ourselves as best we knew how.

He’s here today, with his partner, Chuck. Yes, two gay sons is a bit much for my mother. Not so much for Donald, surprisingly. He’s been more adept at change than she. Winston, Chuck, Nicolo, and I have been grateful for Donald’s support over time.

I haven’t mentioned how I actually paid for my veterinary school. Given that I forfeited my inheritance to Winston and returned the

full two million to Amity, I was penniless, right? Well, my dear grammie died the year after my aborted wedding, and after bestowing an even one million dollars on Marzetta, I was named the sole heir to the rest of her considerable fortune, a windfall that actually exceeded what I would have received from my father. She left me everything except a single item, which she bestowed upon Amity: her silk kimono from Japan.

Grammie explained to me, in a sealed private letter delivered by the attorney, that my grandfather had caught my father at the age of twelve in the barn of their country house fooling around with one of the ranch hands a few years older than he. She said my grandfather whipped them both so hard they had to see a doctor. The ranch hand was fired, naturally, and my father’s relationship with his own father was never the same. She told me she tried to convince her husband that their son was doing what all boys his age do. just experimenting a little. She was sure my dad was straight as a Kiowa Indian’s arrow. But my grandfather was so afraid that his son’s behavior could be permanent he ruled him with icy formality and an iron fist for all of his days.

She said she hoped her words would help me understand my father in regard to my own situation, and they do. She concluded by saying that my grandfather was a cold and autocratic man who was difficult to live with or understand and that if it weren’t for her friend Louise she have