Wilson Mooney, Almost Eighteen by Gretchen de la O Read Free Book Online

from clearing his throat, nothing. So being who I
was, I took advantage of the actual gaps of time Cindy didn’t fill
with commentary about Chase, Aspen, or herself.
    “ Do you live in Aspen?” It
was an innocent enough question. It wasn’t like I was asking him
out on a date or anything. His eyes went wide and his lips pulled
across his teeth. His shoulders tightened. You’d think I
just hit on him
in front of his girlfriend. Gosh, I was
just making conversation that didn’t have anything to do with
Cindy.
    “ No.”
    “ Where do you live?” His
eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, squinting to tell me to
stop.
    “ Denver. I live in Denver,”
he mumbled.
    “ Excuse me, NICK—at what
point does my father pay you to talk? Wilson, he is here to get us
to Aspen and that is it. He isn’t being paid to tell you where he
is from.” She pushed her headphones in her ears and blared some
band with a high pitched prepubescent girl’s voice. She was going
to damage her hearing turning those things up that high. Geez, I
sounded just like Joanie telling me to turn the volume down on my
iPod. My response was always the same, OK, MOM.
    I think something went down
between Cindy and Nick. Yeah I said
it! Someone had to. She was way too mean
and vindictive to him. He was way too submissive. Maybe he didn’t
fall all over her when she tried to hit on him. Or maybe they dated
and he did something to piss her off. My mind ran off with so many
stories, in minutes I had her pregnant with twins and he ran off
with the butler’s sixteen year old daughter Mindy. When the
relationship with Mindy went south, he came crawling back to Mr.
Browler and asked to be Cindy’s chauffeur. Self inflicted torture
for leaving her barefoot and pregnant.
    “ How did you start working
for the Browler’s?” I wanted to know. I needed to debunk the whole
story line about Mindy. He looked back at me in the mirror then
shifted to check Cindy and back to me.
    “ My mother and Cindy’s
father married nine years ago. Her father is paying me to pick you
up.” A smile spread across his face. He looked like the blocks of
humility shattered from his shoulders and his whole demeanor
shifted from burdened to liberated.
    “ Why do you let her treat
you like dog shit?”
    He shrugged his shoulders and leaned
his head to the side. His eyes shifted between Cindy and me. I
turned and noticed she had her eyes closed.
    “ She hates that her father
married my mother.” He kept shifting his eyes from the road to
her.
    “ That’s not your fault.
Least she could do was to see that you both are in the same boat,”
I preached.
    “ I know. But that’s not
going to happen anytime soon. I’ve been in her family for over ten
years, and she still doesn’t see me as more than a gold digger’s
son.”
    “ I’m sorry, that must
really suck.”
    “ No, I lived with her
father and my mother while she was shipped off to a boarding
school. Now I’m a freshman at the University of
Colorado.”
    “ She never talked about her
mom, is she still alive?”
    “ Yeah, I guess she lives in
New York. Nobody ever sees her. She met a guy on the Internet and
split. Left Cindy and nobody’s heard from her since.” His eyes
grew, as he realized he might have shared too much information
about Cindy’s private life with me.
    “ Don’t worry, I won’t rat
you out. Secrets’ safe with me.” I winked at him and let him go
back to driving.
    “ Thanks, I appreciate
that.”
    I closed my eyes as the
miles rolled by. I wanted to think about Wayne and Max. Visualize
them fighting each other over my affections. Instead, all I could
think about was Cindy. Damn it! She was asleep and she still monopolized my
mind. How she must’ve felt knowing her mother left her for a guy
off the Internet. Maybe that’s why she acted the way she did. It
was one thing to have someone take you away from your mother, but
to have her just up and abandon you—wow that was messed
up.
    There was a