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

of the year in Argentina with him, as long as he’ll live six months of the year with me (and Amity?) in some place like California. I’m falling in love with this beautiful man, fully clothed. As I plot our future, a student in Wrangler jeans and a cowboy hat walks by, his boots clomping on the sidewalk. Nicolo follows him with his eyes. “Aha,” I say. “You’re into cowboys.”

“SI, senor. I used to fantasize about the gauchos,” he growls sexily. “They are such an image. What is the word?”

“Icon?”

“Yes. Icon. I loved them as a boy. Only my aunt, Angelica, understood the depth of my attraction. When I was thirteen she sent me a poster of three gauchos mounted on their horses on the pampas. I still have that poster today.”

“Well,” I announce, “we have something in common again. When I was a boy, I loved horses. My parents bought me a pony when I was nine years old. He was large for a pony, about fourteen and-a-half hands, more like a small horse. I boarded him at a stable a few miles outside the city. I loved him more than anything or anyone. I’d saddle him up and ride the dirt roads of the countryside. I’d race the wheat, and sometimes I’d win.”

“What was his name?”

“Cinnamon.”

“So you are a gaucho, and Cinnamon is your range horse?” “Not anymore,” I answer wistfully. “Your horse is retired?” he asks.

“Yes,” I answer simply, not wanting to dive into details.

“But you can still sit a horse, my friend, no? It’s like riding a bicycle. Once you know how, you can always ride.”

“True. How do you know?”

“I ride too. Aunt Angelica gave to me a horse of my own. He waits in Argentina.”

“Maybe someday we’ll ride together,” I offer, aching for the opportunity.

Nicolo answers, “Perhaps in Argentina.” “Perhaps.”

“Harry! Where have you been?” Amity shouts.

After my afternoon ritual with Nicolo, I’ve decided to confront her about the money involved in her last failed relationships. And with the fact that I’ve heard she’s been bragging about my inheritance, in numerical detail. I won’t tell her I smelled her perfume on the will

I’ll wait to see if she confesses. “I was with Nicolo,”

I answer.

“Oh,” she says, forcibly enthusiastic. “Great!” Grite.t She adopts a strained expression whenever I mention Nicolo, and I realize she finds him a threat. I’ve got to be careful how I approach this. “Amity, I want to talk to you about something …. “

“Not now, babe,” she says excitedly. “We’ve got to get Jackie to the airport. They’re trying to fire her!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll explain on the way!” she says, jumping up and down. “Fire up the Beamer!”

She rushes me out the door, I start the car, and we drive three houses down to pick up Jacqueline, who comes flying out the door wearing a ridiculously large hat and carrying a cigarette in hand.

“I hope it’s OK to smoke in your car, Amity,” she pleads, trying to get her hat inside the car, “because I’m just really freaked out. I’m just freaked out because they’re trying to fire me, and I really need to smoke when I’m freaked out.”

“OK, girl!” Amity yells. “We get it. You’re freaked out. Put the damn cigarette in your mouth!”

Amity explains that, while she and Jacqueline were flying together a couple of weeks ago, a muscular guy from Austin with gorgeous long hair came on strong to Amity, but she convinced him that her friend, Jacqueline, was the girl he wanted because, Amity explains, I had asked her to keep her dalliances to a minimum, and she’d decided that any guy who comes on to her, she’d pass on to Jackie, and haven’t I noticed what an effort she’s making? Amity explains that after speaking on the phone, Jacqueline and the guy arrange a date, which happens to be on a day when Jacqueline’s scheduled to work. Since lunch with a muscular guy with gorgeous long hair is preferable to passing out bags of dry-roasted peanuts to the irritable traveling public, Jackie decides to call in sick and go to Austin. And given that she’s flying for free on a “pass,” she feels the need to disguise herself since she’s officially supposed to be sick. She goes to the airport in her “date clothes,” but upon her head she wears a humongous, wide-brimmed black hat the hat she’s wearing now. It’s similar to the style of hats Joan Collins wears on Dynasty, though it’s even more outlandish than anything Alexis Carrington Colby would wear. While she walks through the terminal, I picture the hat knocking people over, downing pay phones, clearing shelves in gift shops.

Jacqueline jumps into the conversation to add that, in tandem with the hat, she wore a huge pair of dark glasses that were so dark she accidentally walked into the TV monitor near the gate podium, as well as the podium itself. At check-in, when the agent asked her to say her name, she whispered it. And when the agent asked her to repeat it, she merely whispered it again, she said, so that if any

other airline personnel were boarding the flight they couldn’t identify her.

Apparently, after Jacqueline secured her boarding pass, the ticket agent called down to the main offices and told them an off-duty flight attendant, with an awning on her head and goggles on her face, was acting awfully peculiar while about to board a flight. Jacqueline was allowed to fly to Austin, but when her supervisor checked it out, her illegal travel was exposed, and subsequently she’s been summoned to the airport to be fired.

So now she’ sin Amity’ scar, smoking like a wet log in a campfire, knocking her hat against the roof, waving her cigarette like a baton. “What am I going to do? Gila is going to fire me!”

Gila is the meanest of all the supervisors. When a flight attendant class graduates, they assign the marginals and potential troublemakers to Gila. She’s