Bon Bon Voyage by Nancy Fairbanks Read Free Book Online Page B

named Commander Bernard Levinson, ex- jefe on a nuclear submarine and Mr. Cereal’s golf partner. They were both Florida widowers, and Barney was seriously pissed off that after all those long tours underwater, with his wife at home raising the kids and taking care of everything else, she died on him when he finally retired so they could take cruises above water together. He seemed like a pretty good guy.
    I wasn’t sure what to make of the doctor. Beaufort E. Lee? What kind of name was that? He said he was from Atlanta, Georgia, and went cruising for a month each year, free of charge because he took over as ship’s doctor. This was his first time on the Bountiful Feast , and he liked it—fewer people and a newer ship meant less chance of stomach viruses flattening all the passengers and ruining his vacation. If that was his bedside manner, I planned to stay well on my own.
    Vera asked him if he knew what to do for someone who’d had a heart attack, which she’d had before Christmas. He told her she didn’t have to worry because he’d seen hundreds of dead heart attack victims. “Young man,” she said, “if I have a heart attack on this ship, I expect you to keep me alive, not add me to your list of dead heart patients.” Then she waved a Caesar salad crouton at him and demanded to know what he’d do if she had a second heart attack.
    â€œWhy, ma’am,” he said, “Ah’d try to keep you alive until the helicopter showed up to take you to the nearest hospital.”
    That’s when he asked me to dance. Evidently he was expected to dance with all the ladies at the table. He’d asked Harriet Barber first, before the soup. They didn’t seem to do too well until she started leading. I got asked during the salad and tried to get out of it, but he wasn’t having any of that. So I let him step on my bare toes once, but when he gave me a twirl and knocked his knee into mine, that was it. “Doctor, you’re one hell of a bad dancer, and I’ve got rheumatoid arthritis. You’re doing me some serious damage here.”
    He stopped dancing and looked me over. “Sorry about that, ma’am. At least you are a very good lookin’ cripple. What prescriptions are you on?”
    So we sort of swayed in place to the music and talked about my meds. Turns out he was a pathologist, and he said I wouldn’t be wanting him to give me any shots unless I was desperate. Medical examiner for the city of Atlanta. When I told him I’d been a cop, we got on just fine. I did warn him it might be a bad idea to mention his specialty to other people. After all, Vera hadn’t taken it very well when he’d brought up all the heart attack corpses he’d seen.

Carolyn
    My first dinner aboard the Bountiful Feast , and it was very good. An excellent pumpkin soup to start, flavored with ginger, if I was not mistaken. Then a Caesar salad that was a little heavy on the anchovy paste in my opinion, but Mr. Barber, who sat next to me, liked it a lot. He told me that he’d kept jars of anchovies in his room when he was a literature student at Howard University and had loved to snack on the anchovies while reading Milton. He sounded rather sad about the whole thing, although he had met his future wife there. I asked how he happened to get into the mortuary business after he’d majored in English.
    It was a sad story. He’d received a Rhodes scholarship and gone on to Oxford while his future wife attended graduate school at Radcliffe. Then while he was enjoying his second year in England, his father and brother were killed in a collision with an eighteen-wheeler on the beltway around Washington, D.C. With no one left alive to take over the business his father had founded, he’d been forced to leave England and run the chain himself.
    â€œRandolph had a duty to our people,” his wife Harriet informed me. “We provide affordable,