Best Friends by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online

I hope you make a nice profit on the Alvis.”
    She hung up before he could go into the ticklish matter of how he would collect the case of water: Let himself into the house again? It was of minor importance that she had wrongly assumed his current business concerned the Alvis.
    He returned the phone to its base. “You better give me the inside disarm code for that security system.”
    Sam displayed the bland expression by which he suggested a query was simpleminded. “Inside you punch in my birthdate in the right order.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me last time?”
    â€œIt never occurred to me.”
    Â 
    Francine Holbrook had been divorced for a year, but suspecting her ex-husband of stalking her, she insisted on meeting Roy at the bar of a country inn, an hour’s drive upstate, so that by using a stretch of back road she could determine whether she was being shadowed.
    What had caused Roy to lose his ardor for Francine was her solipsism. She seldom took account of what other people believed or felt, even or perhaps especially when they were her intimates. Either she or everybody else lived in a dream. However, it might have been just this approach to life that had attracted Roy to her in the first place, he who thought of himself as someone restrained by a concern as to how he was regarded by others. Francine habitually parked next to fireplugs and in bus stops, and did not get as many tickets as you might think. She threw any she got into the glove compartment, never paid them, and got away with it while she was married, leaving such matters for her husband to settle, which he uxoriously seemed to do. This was the same man who now supposedly stalked her.
    Francine was wont to light cigarettes in no-smoking venues, to take cell-phone calls during movies, and to voice clarion and provocative comments in crowded restaurants (“I don’t dare tell her how hot-looking I think she is since the makeover or she’ll shove her tongue down my throat!”). She was also sexually rude. On her own volition in the absence of any stimulus of which he was aware, Francine might open Roy’s fly and fiddle around with his genitals while speaking of unrelated matters, such as the current feud between her sisters, though he was driving or trying to watch the weather report on television. He had enjoyed this stunt when their connection was new and made the mistake of admitting it. For quite some time now, however, it had seemed an invasion of privacy, but, as with the whole affair of which this was only a minor feature, he had not been able to conceive of a means by which to terminate it kindly.
    He had decided to leave the Alvis in the showroom from now on, before the law of averages ordained that its finish got scratched or chipped, and for transportation this evening had chosen the rare example of a fixed-head MGA coupé, oyster-white, which he had recently purchased from an elderly widow whose husband had bought it new in 1958 and maintained it reasonably well over the years, though it had acquired a new exhaust system and a replacement set of tires. Most MGAs had been roadsters, with a folding canvas roof and plastic side-curtains, but this was a hardtop, one of the relatively few exported to America. He had bought it cheap, while still, ethically, paying the woman more than she expected. It was still on his hands only because his client who specialized in the marque did not want another with wire wheels, so at the moment it was listed with the other offerings in his ads in the car magazines and at the Website Incomparable.com.
    As he turned the nimble little car into the parking lot of The Hedges after a pleasant drive at an easy cruising speed of eighty-five when the coast was clear—which was within 10 mph of the MGA’s maximum—he found himself wishing he was meeting Kristin, at the moment the only person of his social acquaintance, of either sex, who might have been