Celtic Sister by Meira Pentermann Read Free Book Online Page B

involved alcohol. Maybe his wife almost committed suicide. As she considered all the morbid alternative scenarios, Amy felt reassured she wasn’t necessarily working for a monster. In some cases it is better to know more details, not less. She ordered another glass of wine. Sorry, Sahil, she thought . Next time I’ll let you tell your story.
    After the third glass of wine and a piece of chocolate cake, Amy started to feel edgy. She would prefer a straight glass of whiskey at this point, but she wanted to look sophisticated in public. She liked red wine. The bottles in her motel room remained unopened. Amy glanced around the bar, wondering if she could snag a corkscrew.
    Now that would be really classy, Amy: stealing a corkscrew from the bar.
    Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a man four chairs away looking in her direction. She realized she was leaning over the counter as if she was about to swipe something, which of course, she was. Amy plopped back down in her chair clumsily and made a mock salute to the curious man. He looked away and returned his attention to a textbook.
    Amy watched him for several minutes. Brown hair, in his early thirties, the man wore blue jeans, cowboy boots and a short-sleeved, blue cotton shirt. Clean-cut and almost innocent-looking, he was actually quite handsome. This surprised Amy because she usually preferred the rugged ne’er-do-wells. That was how she got stuck with Brent, the rebellious boy who turned against his wealthy parents and prided himself on getting into trouble in college. Amy found his James Dean behavior charming until she met Brent’s parents and watched him shrivel in his father’s presence. Ever confident in the fraternity crowd, he was just a little boy in his family home, eager to please his father. When they all got together, the air was saccharine sweet and clearly dysfunctional.
    Amy took a long look at herself in the mirror behind the bar and realized she had dived head first into that dysfunctional world. She knew something was wrong months before Brent bought her a bouquet of flowers, long before he got down on one knee, and years before she got pregnant and considered subjecting another child to the legacy of Richardson abuse.
    She ordered another glass of merlot.
    While she sipped her fourth (or was it her fifth?) glass of wine, she checked out the clean-cut Boy Scout down the bar. He was making notes in the margins of the large textbook, scribbling madly. He never looked in her direction again. Amy moved down the bar until she sat one chair away from the mystery man. He still didn’t look up from his book.
    She cleared her throat.
    The man lifted his pencil and tilted his head slightly in her direction.
    Freed of her inhibitions with the boldness afforded by alcohol, Amy took this small gesture as an invitation. She moved to the next seat and offered her hand.
    “My name is Amy,” she said, taken aback by the hint of seduction in her voice.
    “Sam,” the man replied politely, and he shook her hand. “Sam Foster.”
    The name struck her as familiar, but she was pretty confident she had never met this man.
    “What’re you studying, Sam?” Amy pointed to the book.
    Sam hastily closed it. “Oh, nothing.” He smiled, clearly embarrassed. He draped his arm over the cover, but not before Amy caught the words Crime Scene Investigation.
    “Are you a police officer?”
    “No,” he replied brusquely.
    The bartender stopped by to see if they needed anything. Sam ordered a Diet Coke. Amy downed the last sip of wine in her glass and hoped Sam would notice and offer to buy her a drink. After a long, awkward silence Amy asked the bartender for another glass. When she returned her attention to Sam, he was reading again.
    “Really, Sam. You could give a girl a complex.” She couldn’t believe she’d said it. The flippant remark popped out of her mouth as if she were a barstool pro. She steadied herself against the counter and tried to do a mental count