My Worst Best Friend by Dyan Sheldon Read Free Book Online Page B

House to improve my teaching skills.” That would be the Neighbours’ Project. Another of Cooper’s causes. The local churches had all banded together to run a community-action volunteer programme that taught English as a second language and reading and stuff like that at the Quaker Meeting House. Cooper had been involved in the programme since the summer. “I saw you in the window as I was walking past. In a trance of terminal boredom. So I thought I’d come in and say hello. You know, brighten up your dismal day.”
    I thanked him for his concern. “Only I’m not going to be here too long. I’m waiting for Savanna.”
    “You see?” He pulled out a chair and sat down. “I knew she had to be lurking in the shadows somewhere nearby. The whole state would’ve known if she wasn’t. We would’ve felt the world come to a sudden stop and the heavens quake.” Cooper laughed. “Rogers and Astaire, Spencer and Tracy, Zindle and Mooney.”
    Or, to put it another way, bread and jam. That would be me with the crust.
    Cooper took off his glasses and laid them on the table. “So where is the Princess Zindle on this glorious afternoon?”
    “She’s on her way. We have a date to go to the mall, remember?”
    “Of course! To cheer you up from yesterday’s defeat and disappointment!” He gave me a crooked, cocky kind of smile. “So, where is she?”
    “I don’t know.” I started folding up the newspaper.
    “I take it you’ve tried calling.”
    “She’s not answering her phone.”
    “Now there’s another first.” Cooper laughed. “I always figured Savanna would answer her phone even if she was in the middle of being interviewed on TV.” He gave me another smile. “And you’ve been sitting here waiting for how long?”
    I acted like I had to think about that question for a couple of seconds. Because it wasn’t that long and the time had gone by so quickly. “I’m not sure… An hour or so.”
    “
Or so?
An hour or two? Or an hour or three?”
    Savanna’s lateness was pretty legendary. Archie always joked that Savanna would be late for her own funeral, but Pete said she probably wouldn’t show up at all.
    “Maybe an hour and a half.” Or maybe a little more. “I guess she’s been held up.”
    “Who by?” asked Cooper. “Bonnie and Clyde?”
    “Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.”
    We both laughed.
    Cooper tipped his chair back. “I suppose she could’ve fallen into a time warp,” he suggested. “Right this minute, Savanna Zindle is wandering through first-century Rome, trying to make her cell phone work.”
    “Or maybe she was abducted by aliens.”
    Cooper nodded. Thoughtfully. “That could be it. She could be sitting in a zoo on Trafamadore right this minute.” He held up his hands as though he was reading a newspaper.
“Local girl beamed into deepest space while friend drinks enough tea to drown the whole town.”
    “
Slaughterhouse-Five
, Michael Sacks, Ron Leibman and Valerie Perrine.” I raised my empty cup to him. “She’ll show up before my second gallon.”
    “Sure she will.” He raised one eyebrow. Inquisitively. “But what if she doesn’t?”
    It wasn’t often that Savanna never showed up at all, but it had been known to happen. And not just to Marilouise. There was always a really good reason though. Like the time the sheep escaped from the truck and blocked the road.
    “She’ll show.”
    He leaned forward. “But what if she doesn’t?”
    I made a well-what-can-you-do? kind of face. “Then I guess I’ll go home.”
    He was tapping his shades against the table. “I have a better idea.”
    If we’d been at lunch and he’d said something like that, the others would have exchanged looks and groaned. Cooper’s ideas
never
involved anything like ball games or burgers or getting a pizza like theirs.
    “What is it?”
    He gave me a big grin. If you ignored the hat and the feather and the suit, the grin made him look almost normal. “Why don’t you come with