Read Online Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis - Free Book Online

the glasses on the tables and the grains in the wood. I could see Jacques at another table. Every few minutes he’d say something, then he’d sit back and his hands would spread in the air. He was talking to Amy Goldman, who’d be a senior in the fall but was already eighteen because a virus had kept her out of school for a year. He was teaching her how to bartend. “At your natural speed,” he said. “Don’t rush.”
    She said, “One, two, three, four.”
    â€œGood,” he said. “You’re a slow counter. That means you count to three and a half. Then stop.” She nodded. “That’s it,” he said. “You never need to measure. You just count.” He said something else I couldn’t hear, and she laughed. Sometime later, I heard Jacques telling a story. I’d missed the first half. In the second half, a young airline pilot was excited about his new fiancée, who was riding in coach. Once the plane hit cruising altitude, he met up with her in the lavatory. Jacques paused. “And when the stewardess went into the cockpit to ask the pilots how they wanted their coffee,” he said, “the old guy was asleep by himself.”
    â€œNo one was flying the plane?” Amy Goldman asked.
    Jacques smiled. “No one was flying the plane.” Then he shrugged. “Autopilot usually does fine. In those days, all the airlines had a pretty late retirement age, and the old guy fell asleep a lot.”
    â€œSo what happened?”
    â€œThey got fired,” he said.
    Someone asked him if he’d been the younger pilot.
    â€œNo,” he said. He picked up his glass and drank. “The story just went around.”
    He went upstairs to use the bathroom then, and when he came back down he sat next to me. “Bowman,” he said. He asked me how I was, and how I liked working at the slide. I said I was good, and that I liked my job. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said that I’d better go home.
    When I got home, I was grounded. From now on, my parents said, I would come home right after work. There was no reason to stay. I told them I’d just wanted to talk. “Talk at work,” they said. “You can talk to those people all day.”
    So each night I pedaled home along the highway, almost swerving into the ditch every time a car came, and imagined I was back in the lodge telling stories, even though in real life I almost never talked.
    I read books. My favorites were the ones in which young Victorian women were forced by adverse circumstance to have sex with swarthy highway robbers who were twice their age and had impeccable manners and great taste in jewels. On the front of these books, the women’s shining satin bodices were being ripped apart not by the big-muscled highway robbers themselves, but by sheer spontaneous combustion, helped along by the women’s rapid breathing patterns. The books were all the same. Once the robber gets the woman alone in his ramshackle but comfortable hide-away, which includes a big satin-pillow-filled bed, he looks around, notes the absence of the second bed, and says that if he were a gentleman, he would sleep on the floor. But he is not a gentleman.
    She tells him he is disgusting, a villain, a scoundrel, that her father will discover the abduction and will take revenge, likely with dogs.
    The robber finds this laughable.
    â€œIt is not in my nature to force you, Carlotta,” he tells the woman once they are in the bed. “But I will have to kiss you, you know….”
    With one thick finger he compels her to look into his face. His black eyes are smoldering like burning bread. His lips are so rough they are cracked into segments.
    â€œAfter all,” he says, “I went to such trouble to abduct you.”
    â€œNo,” Carlotta whispers. “I loathe you…loathe you…”
    Two brief pages later, she’s pregnant and locked in a