Authors: Howard McEwen
“My god, men. PUT DOWN MY SETTEE!”
Billy and I eased the sofa back into its place.
“What have you got to say for yourself?” he asked me.
“Sir, I was young man then. A less mature man. If I was to break up with her now, I surely....”
“Break up with her now? You mean to say, you’d break up with her again? After living with the folly of your mistake for all these thirteen years! Incredible! Incredible!”
He then turned on Billy.
“And you, my supposed future son-in-law, I forgave your past friendship with this… this man. Then you have the audacity to bring him back into my home. My home!”
He then dramatically pulled a pistol out of his jacket. It was an antique. Something Burr may have fired to Swiss cheese Hamilton.
“Gibb, I want you out of my house,” he said flailing the end of the pistol through the air. “Soon! Or else I’ll use this! Billy, I leave it to you to get him out of my house!”
With that, the little fella holding the big gun stormed out of the sitting room leaving the doors flapping in his wake.
We quickly lifted the sofa up and gave it a shake. We heard nothing. Each chair was equally silent.
“It isn’t here,” Billy said.
“I gotta get out of here,” I said. My figuring was that an ancient bullet had no problem damaging my modern hide.
Fine. Yes. When Kendra gets back. But we might as well check the library.
I couldn’t leave Kendra. A girl just wouldn’t forgive a guy who not only called her a rodeo clown, but then subsequently left her in a strange home with strange people one of whom carried a blunderbuss as an accessory.
We tip-toed across the hallway from the sitting room into the library. Nothing had changed there in thirteen years. One bored night back when I was dating Abbie, I took it upon myself to pencil in profanities on random pages in classic tomes. The books looked unmoved so I wondered if anyone had appreciated my juvenilia. Probably not.
The sitting room was a good run-through. We had this phone search thing down now. First, we TSA’d the seating, then we shook said seating. It was then I heard a sound. It was a cooing, a calling. It was loud but was uttered in a whispered voice. A mating call, I would soon learn.
“Biiiiiiiiiiiiiily. Biiiiiiiiiily. Wheeeeere arrrrrrrrrrrrre you?”
We turned to the door. Patty half entered the room.
“Where’s Kendra?” I blurted.
She ignored me.
“Hi, sweet-heart,” she said to Billy.
“Where’s Kendra,” I snapped.
“Oh, her. She had to use the washroom somewhere in the east wing. She’s so curious about our home. I got bored and came for my lover boy.”
“Well, bring her here.”
“Okay,” she said with a smile. “Why don’t you help me find her, Billy?”
With that, Patty turned and nonchalantly lifted up the back of her sundress. Now, I’ve already detailed her legs and through this blithe lifting of cloth I learned that crowning those exquisite gams sat a perfectly unblemished alabaster behind. Our view was unobstructed by panties, briefs, hiphugger, g-string, thong or bloomers of any kind. She was sans skivvies. The behind was in the lovely, symmetrical form of an upside down Valentine’s Day heart.
With a backward wink and a smile to Billy, she let the back of her skirt drop and left.
After a moment’s silence Billy asked, “Did you see that?”
“I did,” I said.
“Then you’ll understand.”
“I’ll understand what?”
“Why you are on your own.”
Billy shot out the library door like any man who had been flashed that behind with a girl’s wink and smile as an invitation to fornication.
I was stuck alone in the library. My mind had given up any interest in finding the phone. The brain matter had been divided between Mr. Dunkirk’s sidearm and Kendra’s location and time of return. Wanting to avoid the first and not miss the second, I stayed put. After several minutes of standing in the middle of the library pointlessly, I decided to get back to the task at hand. The phone. I started looking. It wasn’t in the couch, nor the chairs, nor in the antique spittoon. I flit my eyes across the bookshelves on the possibility that Billy had simply laid the thin piece of dark plastic on the walnut shelves. Nothing.
As I was eye-flitting, a volume caught my attention. Could it be, I asked myself. I pulled it away from the shelf. I held it. I smelled it. I turned it over and looked at the cover. It did look to be. I opened the first few pages. The smell of old paper and another era wafted up. I looked at the frontispiece. If it was a reproduction, it was a good one, but I didn’t think it was. I was holding a first edition 1862 copy of Jerry Thomas’
Bartender’s Guide
. Some called it by the clunky name
How to Mix Drinks
. I liked the alternative title
The Bon-Vivant's Companion,
but no matter the name, it was the first cocktail book ever published. I have a cheap reprint back at my condo that I ordered on-line, but this, this was something wonderful. There were stains on a few of the pages. What wonderful liquors could have made those stains, I wondered. I kept turning pages and saw Thomas' showy signature drink
The Blue Blazer
then all his various flips, fizzes and sours. There weren’t many of this edition published, I knew. Jerry Thomas himself, standing behind his bar at The Occidental in San Francisco, may have touched or flipped through this very volume I now lightly held in my hands in twenty-first century Cincinnati?
It was only a throat clearing, but it carried so much meaning. It shot right across the room, inside my pants cuff, up my leg and through my spine. I felt as if I was caught at something and, acting like a man caught at something, I quickly closed Mr. Thomas’ lovely volume and, stupidly, tucked it into my coat and spun around.
“Dallas!”
“Yes.”
“Long-time, no-see.”
“I suppose.”
“What can I do you for?”
“Mr. Dunkirk asked me to confirm whether or not you had yet gotten the hell out of his house.”
“I’m very much the hell here, but I’m only waiting for the return of my lady-friend,” I said. Except I didn’t just say it. I gesticulated it. I swept my left arm up and in the general direction of the west wing. With that, the Thomas volume slipped from my coat to the carpet. I panicked. What if it was damaged, I thought.
That was not Dallas’ first concern. His first thought was of my prior purloining of that package of port.
When I saw the tail end of that thought flash through Dallas’ eyes, Mr. Dunkirk burst in.
“Well, is he gone yet?”
“No, Mr. Dunkirk. I just found him trying to steal that book lying at his feet. Much like that port.”
“You’ve got some damned sticky fingers,” Mr. Dunkirk boomed. “I’m calling the cops. Dallas, lock him in the sitting room. There’s nothing of value there!”
Before I had a chance to protest, Dallas had me by the belt and collar and lifted me up to my toes. I was tossed potato-sack like into the sitting room. Dallas sneered at me then locked the door. The doors were only glass. And the window was open. The duel D’s of Dunkirk and Dallas wouldn’t make good stalag guards, but I wasn’t ready to Steve McQueen it out of there just yet.
In fact, I was content to sit and wait for Kendra. If she beat the cops then we'd sneak out via the door or window. If she didn’t then I’d work this out at the police station. I sat myself on the settee, stretched back and closed my eyes waiting for my fate.
That was until I heard a sound.
The sound I heard wasn’t sirens but the sitting room door creaking opening. I opened one eye to see what was going on. A figure slid into the room then pulled the curtains shut again over the French doors. I opened the other eye.
“Hello, Jake.”
“Hello, Abbie,” I said.
“It’s been a while.”
“Thirteen years,” I said. “That’s a good, long while.”
I wrote earlier that after thirty cute turned to, what? Interesting? Not in Abbie’s case. Something had happened to all those beautiful architectural elements that were thrown together so incongruently. It was like the ground underneath the structure had shifted. Possibly an earthquake had damaged the foundation causing cracks and misalignments in some of the elements. And she was wafer thin which highlighted and amplified those imperfections.
“A long while in time,” she said. “But not in the world of our love, Jake. My affection never faded. I love you still. I’m so happy you’ve come back for me.”
“Wait, a moment,” I said. “I’ve not come for you. I’ve come for a phone.”
“A phone?”
“A phone.”
“There is no phone. You’ve come for me.”
“No, Billy. He nabbed me this afternoon. He roped me into looking for his lost phone.”
She smiled as if I was offering lame excuses to get out of a dinner date.
“Jake, ever since I got that voicemail, I’ve listened to it first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Every morning and every night for thirteen years.”
“That’s not healthy, Abbie.”
“I can recite it back to you word-for-word with every pause, stammer and change of timber of your voice.”
“That’s incredibly unhealthy, Abbie.”
“I’ve studied it. I know your heart was yelling everything counter to what your mouth was saying. Oh, that mouth.”
She leaned in for a kiss but I held her back.
“No, really...” I started but she released a deluge of words.
“In the months after, when I read that your father had taken his own life, I thought you’d come back for me. I did. Then when I heard that your family fortune was lost, I thought you would return for me. I did. I so, so did. But you didn’t, of course. I got reports that you were paying your own way through school like some scholarship kid. I daydreamed of you phoning me or coming to the house, tired of that scraping for a buck. Then after you graduated and bounced from job to job, you still didn’t come for me. You were trying my patience, Jacob Gibb. Then last year I heard you had joined Mr. Carmichael’s firm. That you were well established. And now, now you’ve come. I understand now. I see it all. It was pride. You were waiting until you could truly care for me. Until you were worthy. Until you had some decent money.”
She dammed up the flood of words and embraced me. Tightly. I realized her insanity was high on the bat guano scale. I tried to figure a way out of this Tennessee Williams scene. I finally tried something novel—honesty and forthrightness. What the heck? It never worked in the past, but maybe it would this one time.
“Look, Abbie, none of that’s true. I was just a jerk college boy with no patience for a girl’s foibles who dumped you over voicemail and moved on to other girls. I never looked back.”
With that she grabbed me by the lapels. It was the grip of a dying woman. It was a grip that would damage a new two-thousand dollar suit. I heard the seams of my jacket give. I tried to separate myself. I gripped her by the shoulders and tried to push her away without pushing her down.
She clung to me. I tried the gentlemanly push away again. She clung tighter. She stepped on my right shoe. She didn’t step off my right shoe. She shifted her weight. I counter shifted but lost my balance. We fell, me forward, her backward. To cushion my fall, I put out my arms. To cushion her fall, she spread her legs.
We ended up on the floor, face-to-face, hip-to-hip in a semblance of the missionary approved configuration. Thirteen years ago, it was a position we often took together, sans clothes. However, this was unpleasant.
It was even more unpleasant when Dallas walked in before I could extricate myself.
Abbie conspired with gravity to hold me down.
“Dallas,” she called with too much joy in her voice. “Go away! Lock the door and put some champagne on ice. We’re re-consummating our love!”
I looked up to Dallas. He had the look of a man who was about to kill a man who was assaulting his long-time employer’s eldest, obviously off-kilter scion.
Abbie grabbed me by the ears and turned my face toward hers.
“I do love you,” she whispered.
That’s when I felt the strength of Dallas’ grip on my hair and the steeliness of his biceps. He pulled up. I welcomed the help in getting away from Abbie, but she wrapped her legs—not nearly as nice as her sister’s, but just as strong—around my upper legs, that is, my lower ass.
Dallas’ snapping of my head up from Abbie’s face did afford me the opportunity to see Mr. Dunkirk stride in. There’s a certain rage that flashes through a father’s eyes when he sees a man lying between his daughter’s legs.
“Hold him right there,” Mr. Dunkirk said to Dallas as he pulled that gun from his coat.
Dallas held me right there. Abbie squeezed her legs tighter around me. Mr. Dunkirk aimed his weapon.
Abbie cried out, “Dad, we’re in love again!”
Click
, went the gun.
“Now how does this thing work?” Mr. D. asked himself as he turned the weapon over in his hands.
“Dallas, go and chill that champagne,” Abbie yelled out. “Father, let us be.”