Read Online This Is What I Want by Craig Lancaster - Free Book Online Page B

I’ll send you a note when they go out.” She made to hand the second card back to him, but he waved her off. “It’s for you. Write to me anytime. I love hearing from people who love books.”
    She grabbed the ballpoint pen from her blouse and scratched out the information, then handed the card back to him. Raleigh made a show out of tucking it back into his wallet, and Patricia almost choked on a chortle. The server cast her a look.
    “Skyler! Pick up!” came a call from the kitchen.
    “Oh, crap,” she said, standing and straightening her skirt. “My boss. I gotta go.”
    “Thanks for saying hello,” Raleigh said.
    “Bye, Skyler,” Patricia tossed in. And then, when the young woman was gone, she gave him a devilish look and said, “Such a tough life you have,” and they both cracked up.
     
    Patricia stayed as long as she could, until there was no margin left between where she sat and the obligations that awaited, and then she offered her regrets and her reasons: Samuel, Denise and the grandkids, Maris Westfall and her damned old pies. And Sam. Always, Sam.
    Raleigh walked her to the car. She demurred, but he insisted, and she was glad of that.
    He hung off the door as she started the engine.
    “I’m serious,” he said.
    “About what?”
    “Why are you still here?”
    She smiled. Damn him for pressing it. She rummaged through her purse, giving herself cover while a reason she could use swam for the surface. “It’s just—”
    Raleigh ducked into the cab, and he kissed her. The move was quick, but the kiss lingered. She closed her eyes and she let him do it, and then she pulled back, as if stung. He retracted.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, a contention that didn’t match the look on his face. She knew that look, long though it had been since she’d seen it.
    She was breathing heavily, as though her air were being consumed by the fire burning her up.
    “I have to go,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “See you later, Raleigh.”
    She closed the door and gunned the car to life, and he stood there, ambition in his eyes, and she wondered why he had to look at her like that.

OMAR
    The boy fixated on the strip of white skin between Sam Kelvig’s slipping belt line and the tail of his shirt. The upper crease of Sam’s ass peeked above the leather belt, and Lord help him, Omar Smothers couldn’t help but stare. Old men and their plumbers’ cracks. Is that what he had to look forward to in some distant tomorrow?
    Sam continued rummaging through the small storage shed adjacent to the town hall, which itself was just a Quonset hut painted in simple white and well insulated for the angry seasons of the northern plains. Omar rubbed the sleep from his eyes, then idly picked at the line of acne standing sentry on his right jaw while he waited for instructions.
    “The damn things are in here somewhere,” came Sam’s muffled declaration.
    “What are you looking for, Mr. Kelvig?”
    “Sam. The damn pylons.”
    It was always this way between them: Mr. Kelvig asking him to ditch the formality, and Omar being mindful of what his mother was forever telling him, that he needed to respect how wonderful the Kelvigs had been to them, with the job and the friendship and the support of Omar’s aspirations. It had been Sam who paid for Omar to go to that basketball camp in Las Vegas two years ago, and Omar now received a bucketful of mail nearly every day from college coaches who wanted him to come play for them. That doesn’t just happen for everybody, his mother was always saying, and while Omar had his own talent to credit, he shouldn’t discount Mr. Kelvig’s role in things.
    Omar got it. He did. There weren’t many men in town who’d do what Sam Kelvig had done, who’d embrace a single mother and her bastard son and treat them like his own. He appreciated it. He just wondered sometimes why he wasn’t allowed to feel embarrassed when Mr. Kelvig’s voice would sail out from the stands, louder than everyone