Read Online Claudia Silver to the Rescue (9780547985602) by Kathy Ebel - Free Book Online Page A

for everything.”
    Claudia looked at her younger sister’s expression, guileless and steady as she offered the neat, small knot of ones.
“You have no idea,”
Claudia considered replying, before reminding herself that Phoebe wasn’t good with sarcasm, nor was anything her fault.
    â€œTake it,” Phoebe insisted. “It’s eighteen bucks.”
    â€œUh, yeah. No way,” Claudia scoffed, swiping her bank card and pushing open the lobby door.
    Claudia and Phoebe took their spot at the end of the line for the ATMs. There was an air of pink-cheeked festivity among the young couples en route to ecumenical church services with full choir and the potbellied husbands who’d been sent out for last-minute eggnog, rum, and tulips.
    Claudia immediately spotted Garth Kahn a few customers ahead. Garth was still clamped to the puffy vinyl headphones he’d worn as an undergrad. His curly dark head grooved in time to whatever he was listening to, the cord disappearing into his messenger bag. The same shop-teacher eyeglasses. Everything about Garth was short and thick, including his fingers, the stubble along his jaw, and what looked like a fresh pair of brown suede Wallabees. In his giant silver parka he resembled a beetle of the Volkswagen variety.
    Claudia and Garth had been at Columbia together, and now they had four-odd years of adult life between them. At the miserably humid, very end of last summer, when it felt like anybody Claudia had ever met was enjoying a Campari cocktail at one of the venerable beaches of the Eastern Seaboard while she trudged a vacant city piled with hot garbage, Claudia had gone on a single, cringe-worthy date with Garth. First running into Garth at Café Roma, bristling slightly at his explanation that Roma was “his,” when it had been hers all along and she couldn’t remember ever having seen him there before, followed by the request for her phone number, a boldly presented invitation, Fela Kuti at the Prospect Park Bandshell, and Jamaican goat roti and sorrel drink ordered with an uncomfortable hint of swagger. Claudia had sported an unflattering vintage dress she’d bought on credit in a frenzy of eager preparations and never worn again.
    But it was after smoking a joint with Garth that he’d rolled with a filter and tobacco, as he’d learned to do during his junior year in Barcelona, that Claudia had become fatally distracted by Garth’s perspiration. Staring at the side of his round, beaming face, she marveled at the subjectivity of sweat. How was it that Ruben Hyacinth’s was a jasmine nectar she wanted to lick, while Garth leaked bottled gravy on that hot summer night? The deal breaker, however, was when Garth rose up on the fleece blanket he’d pulled from his backpack, and, unable to convince Claudia to join him, gave his body to the music in twitchy ecstasy, just like a white-boy former Deadhead who’d taken an African dance class at the Y and was now practicing his moves as a nearby klatch of home-care aides, still in their floral scrubs and perforated white clogs from work, convulsed in laughter—all of which, Claudia had realized with horror, was in fact happening.
    â€œI really want to kiss you right now,” Garth had said to her when the concert ended.
    â€œThanks,” Claudia mustered.
    â€œThanks?”
Garth repeated. “How’m I supposed to lean in for the kill after that?”
    â€œHow about not?” Claudia countered. “Does
not
work for you?”
    â€œWow.” Garth was hurt and impressed. “That shit’s ice-cold.”
    â€œI’m sorry,” Claudia said. “It’s just—”
    Garth raised a paw. “This is the thing,” he’d interrupted. “And I don’t want you to say anything, or kiss me if you don’t want to. But when I look at you, I picture our son’s bar mitzvah. There. I said it.”
    Claudia stared at Garth