Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [64]
“There’s some cash in there,” she said, “and a credit card to pay for the car.”
“I can take care of that,” I said, pushing back the envelope.
“No, no, I insist,” she said, returning it to me. “You never know. Something unexpected might come up, and I’d rather you had it just in case.”
Then she cocked her head to one side and began to whisper, conspiratorially, turning bodily away from the others while speaking out of one side of her mouth and not moving her lips. It made her completely unintelligible.
“Crky. Ijswanedooknowivyewnoo,” she began.
“What?” I asked. “I can’t understand you. What’s wrong with your face?”
“Nothing. Sssh. I just wanted to see if you knew…” she paused, eyeing me carefully. “You never actually asked Mindie to marry you, and—are you sure about this?”
I looked past her to Mindie, sitting in the middle seat with Wendy, talking in animated tones. I wondered how long it would be before Min learned the truth about the kind of movies Ms. Waboombas really made and the whole thing came unglued like a space shuttle.
“Of course, I’m sure,” I said, scoffing. “You think I’m some kind of spineless airhead who would go along with a marriage he didn’t want just because he was afraid of confrontation?”
I laughed. She didn’t. It hurt.
“Well, I’m not,” I said.
“I see,” Aunt Helena replied sadly, lowering her head a moment.
After a bit of studying her toes as she gently pushed driveway gravel around, she looked up and fixed me with an almost frighteningly intense stare—as if she could read things through my eyeballs that were printed on my brain. Things that were misspelled.
“Ms. Nuckeby was fired from her agency this morning. Did you know that?”
I was struck. “No, I didn’t. Because of that business yesterday?”
“Yes. I think your grandfather had something to do with it.”
I found myself suddenly growing very angry. He had no business…
“Damn him,” I sputtered. But after a moment, I softened a bit. Anger was difficult for me to sustain. “Well, I suppose it had to happen.”
“Corky! She didn’t deserve that!”
“I don’t know. She did show up at my home unannounced…”
“She liked you!”
“She didn’t even know me.”
“Sometimes you can just tell about someone,” she said warmly, as if remembering a time she could ‘just tell’.
“Or maybe she could ‘just tell’ that I lived in a multimillion dollar home…”
“Corky! You can make negative judgments about her without knowing her, but she can’t make positive ones about you without knowing you? You know what that is?”
“Umm—savvy?”
“Sexist. Misogynistic. At the very least, just plain unfair.”
“But with a certain wisdom of experience, Grandfather might have a point…”
“On the top of his head. And now I’m beginning to see the same point on the top of yours. Genetic, obviously.”
“Aunt Helena…”
“How does Mindie make you feel, Corky?”
I looked again over her shoulder at Mindie in the car, laughing vivaciously, chatting up Ms. Waboombas, obviously certain that she was on the brink of becoming a major Hollywood star—the kind who doesn’t have to perform oral sex on camera.
Aunt Helena continued without waiting for an answer. “And how did Ms. Nuckeby make you feel?”
I hesitated, then admitted in a soft and faraway voice, “Wonderful.”
“Then don’t you think, Corky, that she deserves at least a little time for you to make a proper determination of whom she is and what she really wants from you? Before you ‘Next’ her?”
I gave it some thought.
“I know you, Corky. You’re hoping that someday, somehow, Mindie will be nice to you and love you like you deserve to be loved. And you do deserve to be loved, my dear. But wouldn’t it be better to find someone who already likes you— maybe someone you already like, as well?”
Did love work that way? Two people genuinely interested in one another with no ulterior motives? Hard to imagine. But if it did…?
I looked down at my own toes digging in the gravel, then stopped, looked up at her and spoke with a confidence that surprised even me.
“How can I find her?”
Helena sighed a heavy breath of relief, nearly laughing. Why was