Lies You Wanted to Hear by James Whitfield Thomson Read Free Book Online Page B

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Chapter 6
    Matt
    I woke up the morning after my blind date feeling like I’d drunk a bottle of Love Potion Number Nine. Lucy was bright, sexy, funny, everything a guy could want. All my caution was gone. I sang in the shower, dressed in my uniform, and danced my way out the door. People on the street smiled at me as if they knew. It seemed almost cruel that I would have to wait for two and a half days to see her again.
    It didn’t take long for doubts to set in. I regretted having talked so much. Women like guys who are reserved. Mysterious. The ones who keep them guessing. The evening must have been boring for Lucy. Maybe that’s why she drank so much. Still, I was certain I’d done the right thing by not letting her entice me up to her apartment. There probably weren’t many men who could have resisted the temptation. Then I started wondering if that was something she did often, get wasted and try to screw some guy on the first date. The thought made me sick to my stomach. I’d had several long-term relationships in my past, even lived with a nurse for a year, but there was only one other time in my life that I’d felt like I was in love.
    In my travels after junior college, I went on vacation to Puerto Rico with Carlos Tacoronte, a guy I knew from my job on a golf course in West Palm Beach. Carlos introduced me to his cousin Enid, who was a freshman at the university in Mayaguez. Enid was gorgeous. She could surf as well as any of the boys on the beach, and she delighted in my clumsy attempts to learn. The last night I was there we walked in the moonlight and she let me kiss her. A month later I was back on the island working on a construction crew for Carlos’s brother. We dated for seven months before she dumped me for an Argentinean graduate student, and I went back to the States with a broken heart. It seemed like puppy love in retrospect, but I had kept my feelings closely guarded ever since. Now, after one evening with Lucy, I was ready to do cartwheels on the edge of a cliff.
    The workday was long and slow, but I was looking forward to playing softball that night. We usually started at seven, but the weather was so hot they’d moved the game back to nine, hoping it would cool off after dark. After work I went home and washed my car. It was a classic yellow ’56 Thunderbird with a V8-312 engine—removable white hardtop with porthole windows on the side, black and white upholstery, a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror. The car had originally belonged to my uncle Joe. I was a toddler when my dad died, and my mom’s younger brother Joe stepped in as a surrogate father. He took me bowling and fishing and duck hunting, to Pirates and Steelers games. I loved to go riding in the T-bird, squeezed in between him and one of his girlfriends on the bench seat. I told him I was going to get a car exactly like it when I grew up, and Joe said maybe he’d give me his. One day my mother heard me pestering him, asking how old I’d have to be to get the car.
    “Now listen here, young man,” Mom said, looking at me but scolding us both. “Your uncle Joe had to work hard in the mine to buy that automobile, and I’m telling you right now there are two things that are never going to happen as long as I’m on this earth. Number one, you’re never going to spend a single day working in a coal mine. Number two”—she held up two fingers—“I am not going to let Joe or anyone else give you something you should have earned for yourself.”
    Uncle Joe never married. He kept the T-bird in his garage in pristine condition and drove a junker to the mine. Four years ago, he called and asked me if I wanted to buy it. He said he was having a hard time getting in and out of the low seats with his creaky knees. I told him how much I loved the car, but there was no way I could afford it. He asked me how much I had in my savings account, and I said about twelve hundred dollars.
    “What do you say we make it