Uncross My Heart by Austin, Andrews & Austin Read Free Book Online

I need the number?”
    Like most crazy people, he had a point. I told him to forget the hotel and simply call my cell phone, which set off another series of questions about my cell-phone number, and I finally told him to forget the entire topic—I would call him.
    “So you’re headed for California—Jose’s Queerville. It’s a viper pit. In fact, the entire state is made up of degenerates. All driven by the entertainment industry—”
    “I’m sorry, Father. I’ve got to go meet Dennis.”
    “Thank God for Dennis. We all need ballast, my dear. Good-bye.”
    He hung up and I fought a feeling of angry guilt, the sensation that made me want to shout obscenities at my father and then throw myself on the ground begging forgiveness for being impatient with the behavior of a man who didn’t know who or where he was much of the time. Perhaps it was time to talk to him about assisted living or a retirement village, but that seemed so demeaning to a man who had once commanded troops in battle.
    I sulked. The truth was I had really liked Vivienne Wilde, wanted to be her friend, found her interesting and attractive, and she had tricked me, turned on me, used me. I was a good judge of character and somehow I had misjudged hers.

Chapter Six
    At dawn I phoned the teenage boy down the road and asked him to check on the horses while I was gone, then dropped Ketch off at the kennel and kissed his big furry mug good-bye, telling him I would be gone only two days. From there I drove to the airport, parked in the long-term parking garage, and took a shuttle to the terminal. After hours of standing in line, being searched and scanned, I was finally offered a seat on the plane, where like a captive monkey I drank from a small cup of water and packed my jaw with peanuts. Air travel required the patience of…a saint.
    Several hours later, after a bumpy landing during which a woman whipped out her rosary and began saying her beads, I was in a cab on the way to my hotel.
    The cabbie chatted away. “We’re going right by Berkeley campus off Shattuck Street.”
    I leaned back, waiting for the elegant sprawl of the campus to come into view—the architecture an unlikely mixture of Spanish roofs and Roman columns.
    “Too much traffic. I’ll take Center Street. It’ll be—”
    “No, don’t turn here.” I sat up suddenly, my voice loud and reactionary. Center Street had been the vortex of my pain decades ago, and now a stranger’s mention of it resurrected that memory.
    He slammed on the brakes and looked at me in the rearview mirror.
    “You okay?”
    “I need to get to my hotel.” I didn’t want more flashbacks of the day Jeannette and her husband stood there, lying to me. I needed to get to my room, unwind, shower, order up some food. I need to center myself. The irony—I had to get away from Center Street to center myself. I twisted the gold signet ring around and around on my little finger, playing with it like a teething child seeking comfort from the constant ache.
    * * *

    The following morning I sat onstage in a large hotel ballroom flanked by three other theologians in what had been billed as a frank discussion of the sexuality of Jesus—a topic that simply nailed for me the American obsession with sex, when perfectly sane people wanted to spend an afternoon talking about the sex life, or lack thereof, of their deity. If He died for our sins, isn’t that enough? Does He have to account for His love life?
    The buxom woman moderator introduced the four of us. A learned professor of religious sociology from Harvard who looked like a large heron in his silver suit, his white hair flying back off the top of his head as if he’d been in a hundred-mile-an-hour straight-line wind. A short, overly energized Methodist minister from New York who looked pinched. And a gypsylike professor of feminist studies who kept eyeing me when she thought I wasn’t looking. After an hour, I knew the Harvard-heron wanted understanding, the