The Scandalous Summer of Sissy LeBlanc by Loraine Despres Read Free Book Online

for. There the monks in their saf-
    fron robes tended rows of golden Buddhas and taught him that this
    life was just one small step in the eternal journey. They showed him
    how to take away the pain of living. But after a couple of months,
    he realized they were so focused on the pain, they’d given up on the
    joy. He couldn’t stay. The river of desire was too strong in him.
    Then in 1954, when a big contract they were counting on didn’t
    come through, his American partner skipped town with all their
    money. Parker managed to pay off his men. He knew they’d have
    starved if he hadn’t. But it wiped him out. And he wasn’t able to
    repay their big suppliers. He remembered his father telling him, “A
    man has to stand behind his word.” Parker felt he’d had his shot
    and he’d dropped the ball. He was humiliated.
    His Thai partner suspected Parker was in league with the thief.
    All Americans looked the same to him. With an Asian prison loom-
    ing over his future, Parker, who was carving out a place for himself
    as an international businessman, was forced to slip out of the coun-
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    L o r a i n e D e s p r e s
    try at night, in an old fishing boat that belonged to one of his
    laborers.
    The girl cried. She wanted him to marry her and take her back
    with him. He considered it. She was strong and sweet and when
    she’d throw her long black hair around and look at him from the
    corner of her eye, he found her hard to resist. But he knew it would
    be wrong. He didn’t love her.
    By then he’d had more women than he could count, in every
    color and hue. And some of them meant a lot to him. But he always
    held back. Something indescribable was missing.
    He slunk back to the United States with the bitter taste of defeat
    on his tongue. He felt like a stranger in San Francisco, where
    nobody cared that he claimed to have been part owner of a con-
    struction company in some godforsaken underdeveloped country.
    He returned home to his mother, now living in Miami, and his
    sense of humiliation was complete. The only work he could find
    was on nonunion construction crews. His mother lied about his
    occupation.
    He met a girl in Miami, this time Southern and Jewish. She was
    smart and sarcastic, and had wonderful curly red hair. Her father
    owned a big Cadillac dealership and was willing to take Parker into
    the business.
    “Perfect,” his mother said.
    The date was set. Parker went with his fiancée to pick out their
    silver. As he watched her agonize over the pattern, arrange knives
    and spoons on different place mats, he envisioned their life together
    and he couldn’t make himself go through with it. He couldn’t spend
    the rest of his life living off his father-in-law’s dole. Besides, that
    indescribable something wasn’t there.
    His mother said he’d find any excuse not to get tied down.
    “You’re thirty-two and you don’t have anything to show for it. No
    family. No education. No business. Nothing. It’s time you built
    yourself a life, boy, or life’s going to pass you by.” He knew she was
    right.
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    In the middle of his life, Parker’s vision of himself was shrinking.
    He decided to go back to Gentry, where, once upon a time,
    crowds cheered and called him the great Parker Davidson. Besides
    he wanted to see how Sissy was doing.
    He’d half hoped she was settled and fat, so he could reject her as
    she had once rejected him. He intended to close the door on that
    painful adolescent fantasy. So the last thing he’d expected was the
    heat their encounter had generated. But there it was. Maybe that’s
    what he’d really been hoping for all along.
    He swung the telephone truck into the rutted gravel parking lot.
    Calvin Merkin, his supervisor, was standing in the doorway looking
    pissed.
    Parker jumped out and went inside to face him. As the lightning
    flashed and the thunder boomed, Calvin did his duty and chewed
    him out for a