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

plead. “Of course I was going to tell you.” “When?” he asks, opening his truck door, sliding himself into the cab. He slams the door hard enough to break it. “Were you going to call me from your honeymoon?”

“There’s a reason I was going to marry Amity,” I tell him through the open window. “Look, it’s for you. You and me. And your mom.”

He starts the engine. “You are marrying Amity for me?” He laughs. “Perhaps I have mistaken who you are.”

“No,” I say. I don’t want to break anyone’s heart. How the hell am I going to explain this? That he and I can live happily ever after. That I can pay off his student loans. We can move to Argentina. Buy our own ranch with horses. Start our own newspaper. We can do anything except get married because I have to marry Amity in order to make us all comfortable. I look into his black coffee eyes, see my own reflection in their light. I’m teeny tiny. Nothing really. Like a cartoon on a filmstrip.

He turns off the engine. It’s eerily quiet. We’re suspended in time for a moment while he wrinkles his brow. “Do you love me, Harry?”

I take a breath. Exhale. “Si.”

“And do you love Amity?”

I take a moment and realize that I do. I love Amity, even with all her faults. “SI.”

“You love us both, but you’re going to marry Amity.” He squints at me, then closes his eyes altogether, then starts the car. “Wait!” I plead, pulling on his shirt. “I can explain.”

But he grabs my hand and throws it off his shirt as if it were a deadly spider crawling toward his throat. Then he slams the truck into gear and takes off.

I race for the house to grab my keys and head after him. As

this Nicolo person!” she huffs. I look at Amity, and I’m ready to kill her. My mother follows my eyes, my thoughts. “It wasn’t Amity’s fault,” she says, forcefully. “She never told me directly. I figured it out myself.”

“I just said he was your Mend,” Amity clarifies in a neutral voice.

“So what?” I say, stomping into my room. “He is.” I push everything around on my drafting table, lift up magazines and dirty T-shirts, throw junk mail on the floor. “Where are my fucking car keys?”

My mother follows me into my room, her hands on her hips. “Watch your language, Harry. Now you listen to me good and I’ll tell you what I told Amity: This thing with this Nicolo better stop!” Amity comes into my room, and stands behind my mother, and gives me a shrug as if to say sorry. My mother continues. “I’ve told Amity there is no reason for her to try to cover for you and your foreign friend, and I’ve given her the same warning I’ll give to you: I’ve never been more excited about a wedding in my entire life, even my own. But this wedding better be real or else! I don’t like being made a fool of. And I won’t allow either of you two to. make a mockery of the Ford family name just so you can have enough money to pop bonbons on the back patio of your house in Highland Park—understand?”

Amity’s eyes flash at the thought of having a house in Highland Park.

“Bonbons?” I ask incredulously. Then I push past them both and sail out of the house.

Nicolo’s mother comes to the door, stands behind the screen,

doesn’t ask me in. “Qu quiere us ted sea or she asks formally. “Nicolo,” I say. “I want Nicolo.”

“No de sea hablar conus ted she tells me.

“I have to explain,” I tell her. “Please.”

“Estd muy enojado,” she warns.

“I know he’s angry. And I know he doesn’t want to talk to me. But I can explain. Please tell him I need to talk to him.”

“Wait on the porch,” she says, converting to English. “He is showering himself. I’ll tell him.”

She closes the door and I sit down on the concrete steps, shaded by the large oak tree that rises from the lawn. The afternoon heat is just hitting its stride, and locusts are buzzing in drones. What am I going to say? I’d need a whole afternoon and a bottle of tequila to explain it all. I doubt he’ll give me but a couple of minutes to lay it out. I try to collect my thoughts, but it’s like trying to round up a swarm of flies.

Fifteen minutes pass, maybe twenty. I scour the trees, search for signs of the locusts in concert. And pan the sky, decide which clouds are friendly, which I would avoid. And watch the heat waves rise from the paved street until they dissipate into the atmosphere or scatter by the force of a passing car. And study the gait of the occasional pedestrian, determine his life circumstances by the way he walks. Guess the contents of his shopping bags or why he chose that particular breed of dog on the leash. I watch well, fed robins land on the shaded areas of the neighboring lawn and turn their heads sideways until they see movement in the earth and dive into the soil with their beaks and miraculously pull out a worm. And I watch the sun move in the sky, slowly, rearranging the lawn’s shadows ever so slightly, but enough that I notice. An hour has passed, maybe more. He’s not coming out. I knock again. No one answers. I leave.

When I return home, Amity and my mother are gone. I take the longest shower of my life because I don’t know what I’m going to do when the shower ends. I hate washing the smell of horse off my body. It is so connected with my happiness in the past and in the present. It’s depressing to watch the suds slide the memory

off my body and whisk it down the drain. I wash my hair several times, until my fingers eventually