Walk (Gentry Boys) by Cora Brent Read Free Book Online

had any Pepto Bismol in my purse.  Then he disappeared for an hour.  Kendra didn’t seem put out. 
    I was having a good time.  A great time.   At least I was until I visited the bathroom and heard some of Briana’s cousins bitchily saying that the blissful couple ‘rushed into this shit and won’t last six months’. 
    My face burned as I sat on the toilet with my panties around my knees.  Why the hell couldn’t people just let people be happy?  Really, did it physically hurt to keep their nasty tongues inside their stupid heads?  Just who the actual fuck did they think they were???
    Suddenly the women were staring at me, agape, red-cheeked, overly perfumed.  That’s when I realized I’d flung open the stall door and asked them that last precious question out loud, at the top of my lungs. 
    The champagne had been poured a little too freely tonight and Briana wasn’t the only lightweight.  But unlike my friend I didn’t get weepy.  Just hostile.
    With a flourish I flushed the toilet, pulled my panties up and calmly walked to the sink to wash my hands. 
    “Who the hell are you again?” one of the cousins asked me.  She resembled a two hundred pound jackrabbit, twitchy nose and all. 
    “I am a bridesmaid,” I answered with a straight face.  “Do not screw with me.” 
    Then I left.  It wasn’t my finest moment.  What was it about weddings that turned people into sociopaths anyway? I read a story just last week about a wedding brawl that started when one bridesmaid accused another of stealing her hair extension.  Or was it her husband? It didn’t matter.  I needed some air. 
    I left the party to its line dancing mania and walked toward the dark golf course, removing my shoes and then giggling like a child over the tickle of grass between my toes.  It had been so long since I’d felt that, the distinctive sensation of cool grass on bare feet.  Why was it that we left behind such simple pleasures when we reached adulthood? 
    “Macon!  Macon!!  Last one to the lake is a rotten egg!”
    “Hey, Evie!  Wait up, would ya!” 
    Those echoes belonged to another place, another time.
    Sometimes I found myself making a wish that had never occurred to me as a girl.  I wished there’d been another Dupont.  Brother or sister, it didn’t matter.  Just someone else who had shared the unique world that siblings created with one another. 
    Once upon a time, Macon, the serious intellectual, had asked our parents why they’d never had any other children.  Our father had laughed and insisted that we, their twins, were dreams come true.  And when your dreams came true you didn’t try searching for new ones.  That was just the kind of fanciful excuse our father would have invented.  Richard Dupont was a professor of mythology.  He spoke in terms of fables and muses. 
    Coming upon the lake in the darkness was like finding a magical land.  It was narrow and likely shallow.  In the daylight it was probably nothing special, just a ditch carved out of the earth to create scenery and likely filled with recycled wastewater.  But at night, with the full moon reflecting on the still surface, it was pure enchantment. 
    Or, I might have still been wearing champagne goggles. 
    Kneeling down on the bank, I was glad Briana had chosen bridesmaid dresses that were loose and fell right above the knee.  Kneeling in a gown was hell.  Maybe I was still feeling all tenderly sloppy from the wedding or maybe I was channeling my childhood affection for myths and wishes because I found myself searching eagerly for shooting stars.
    My hometown of Flagstaff, in the northern segment of the state, wasn’t nearly as bright or populous as the Phoenix area.  Nighttime was magnificent there, full of constellations and celestial events that faded in metropolitan skies.  When I was a kid I believed in the secrets found in shooting stars and birthday candles. 
    I had neglected to blow out any candles on my birthday