Bad Boy by Olivia Goldsmith Read Free Book Online Page B

before Chuck had split.
    Now he pulled out the Polaroid his mother had taken earlier in the day and inserted it into the corner of that frame. He stared at the picture: Jon Delano, twenty-eight years old, embracing his mother, and for a moment, it p. 50 changed before his eyes. It turned black and white and suddenly there was no mature blooming wisteria nor a mature Jon. Instead, a very young Jon and his young mom were embracing while Mr. Delano walked past them, struggling with two suitcases. Jon blinked and the actual Polaroid returned. Spooked, he got up and walked away from the desk.
    Well, he was really tired. Not to mention stuffed. Thank God Toni, his last stepmom but one, had canceled at the last minute, or his stomach would probably have burst. He looked out the window to the lit garden and the darkness beyond. It was almost 10:00 P.M., but that didn’t stop people from working on Sunday at Micro/Con. All the staff prided themselves on the incredibly long hours they put in. Sunday was just another workday, and even now the parking lot was almost half-full. Jon patted his belly and sank into a beanbag, wiggling his butt until it assumed the position. There was something about Mother’s Day that depressed him, and it wasn’t merely surveying the trail of human wreckage his father had left behind.
    Jon had grown up listening to the women’s complaints. It wasn’t only his father’s various wives, though; it was also the women who gathered for coffee at his mother’s house. Other women had even worse stories about their exes, stories that he’d listened to, hiding behind the couch, when he was seven, nine, and fourteen. His mother’s friends seemed inca p. 51 pable of ditching their husbands or finding ones who treated them well. Why’d they stay? he still wondered. He thought of Barbara and her baking. After the biscuits had come the inevitable question: “Hear from your father?” He thought of Janet’s skinny shoulders when she turned her back on him, pretending to arrange the flowers, and asked, “Have you heard from your father?”
    It wasn’t Mother’s Day, Jon decided. Not for him. For him, it had been Heard from Your Father Day and Have You Got Anyone Special Day. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and, with his right hand, removed his glasses so that he could massage the reddened flesh under the nosepiece. Jon had almost two hours before his customary midnight date with Tracie and, although he had piles and piles of work to do, if he just kept his eyes closed and napped for just a minute, ten minutes at the most . . .
    Jon was eleven and sitting in a leatherette booth across from his father. A plate of untouched eggs, their whites runny, the yolk congealing, sat undisturbed in front of him, while his father was busy tearing pieces of the running egg albumen with a side of his fork, then pushing the nasty stuff onto a burned corner of toast and popping it into his mouth. Jon was aware that he was asleep, yet the man in front of him was so real, so perfectly reconstructed in his dream, that it was impossible to believe the guy was not there. Jon could have counted each bristle of his father’s five p. 52 o’clock shadow. Chuck finished the last bit of egg, wiped the plate with some of Jon’s toast, and began to chew it up. He leaned forward. “Just remember this, son,” he said. “There’s not a woman in the world who won’t buy a lie she wants to believe.”
    Jon jerked his eyes open. He was losing it. Weeks of endless toil on the Cliffhanger project and a lousy Friday and Saturday night, topped off by this Sunday, bloody Sunday had given him the willies. He looked at his watch: 10:31. If he could just get out of the beanbag chair, he could get in at least a solid hour of work before meeting Tracie and reviewing what a lousy weekend they’d both had. Jon might have a surfeit of mothers to entertain, but on this weekend, he was careful to be extra attentive to Tracie. Without a