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

and I put them in touch with your family.”

“My family? But “

“Through the airline, Harry. Of course I don’t know your family, but I convinced the supervisor that you and I were good enough

friends that I needed to call your mother and assure her that every thing was simpatico. She’s a lovely woman, Harry. Just precious. I promised her I’d take care of you.”

“See,” Nurse Carbonada says, shuffling into the room. “I told you she’d come back.”

Man, life is fast. Yesterday I had an appendix; today I don’t. I have a new roommate whose family dwells in a lake. I have a prehistoric nurse who thinks Amity is my girlfriend, and no doubt my mother hopes Amity is my girlfriend, and Amity is acting like my girlfriend. I wonder where the lanky guy went.

The nurse sets my meal tray down in front of me and leaves before she hears the guy on the other side of the curtain call, “Nurse? Nurse?”

Amity draws back the curtain slightly, peers in, and says, “Vampira is gone, darling’. What can I do for you?”

“Oh,” I hear the guy say nervously. “Never mind.” “Come on now,” Amity pursues. “What is it?” “No, really.”

“This is a hospital,” she says in a motherly tone. “Don’t be shy.”

“I need my bedpan emptied.” He chuckles uncomfortably. “No problem,” Amity chirps. She disappears behind the curtain and then reappears carefully carrying a metal bedpan out in front of her. She looks sideways at me and winks, announcing, “Peepee!” while walking into the bathroom with it. She empties it, flushes the toilet, walks past me smiling, and steps beyond the curtain to my compadre. “Fresh as a daisy,” she says. He thanks her and she returns to the bathroom to wash her hands. “Now, Harry,” she calls from the bathroom, “I have to run errands today and I may not make it back until after dinner. Are you going to be

OK?”

I hardly even know this girl and she’s treating me like a best friend. If it were any other time in my life I’d ask myself what’s

wrong with this picture. But considering the state I’m in, this picture is frame able “I’ll be fine,” I answer, opening up the envelope that holds my paycheck. It’s still not enough money to get me started on this life in Dallas. And I can only imagine what the hospital bill will be.

“You’re sure?” she asks, coming back into the room. I nod affirmatively, and she grabs her purse. “OK then, Bubba, I’m going to take off. They say we can get you out of here in just a couple days. I promise to push things along.” She kisses me on the cheek and glides out of the room, singing over her shoulder, “See you tonight!”

“Man,” the guy behind the curtain says, “you sure do have one fine lady there. And she don’t even care about your sissy-boy cravings.”

Sissy-boy cravings? Interesting way to put it. I guess he heard the part about the lanky guy. Yet he’s still talking to me? Does this mean the banjo duet from Deliverance will start playing, and he’ll rip back the curtain and tell me I have a purdy little mouth? “What are you in for?” I ask as if we’re serving hard time.

“Swollen feet,” he answers. “Circulation problems. Can’t walk no more.” Cain’t woke no mower.

I relax somewhat, knowing that he can’t get to me and that he hasn’t had some kind of belly surgery that inspires him to rip back the curtain and lift up his gut and show me the scar. “That’s tough. A guy’s gotta be able to walk, huh?” I tell him, dipping a spoon into my fish broth.

“It ain’t so bad. I can eat lyin’ down and watch TV lyin’ down. Only thing tough is takin’ a shit.”

“I can imagine.” But I won’t. In fact, I think it’s time to think about little puppies and rainbows and unicorns and all things fresh and clean.

And about getting out of here.

THREE

he first week out of the hospital my mother insisted on putting me up in a suite at the Mansion on Turtle Creek. On her days off, Amity visited me, and I was embarrassed to have her see me there, cloaked in the opulence and abundance of Dallas’s finest hotel, but Amity loved it and delighted herself each visit by ordering various twenty-four-dollar room service items for me.

But the gravy train is over, I’m healed, as well as financially cut off again, and now I’m back at work for the first time since the surgery. Amity insists on flying with me. “With the stitches removed, I have to make sure your stomach doesn’t fly open when the plane de pressurizes she hoots. She has this off-the-wall way of making me feel wanted. How can I not like her? It’s as if she’s some character an actress would play only she’s more interesting. And Amity has met me at my weakest, most vulnerable, and insecure, yet easily looks beyond the maudlin sap who cried on the airplane and convalesced in the hospital. She sees the waggish devil from my college days who even I only hope still exists somewhere inside me.

We’re assigned to fly with one of my other two training class mates in Dallas. Bart is a god. He has the most incredible legs and ass I’ve ever seen. Out of uniform, he wears Wrangler jeans and

cowboy boots and shirts that show off his muscles. A former high school football jock from one of those interchangeable suburbs north of Dallas, he’s Texan to the bone. He loves to tell jokes that put down Yanks like me. All he has to do is shake a woman’s hand and look her in the eye, and she’ll want to fuck him. He rolls great joints.

This is the first time I’ve seen Bart since training, and we’re huddled with Amity in the front galley of