Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [77]
“He’s fine with it.
“You haven’t told him.”
“Of course, not.”
“Do you plan to?”
“Eventually.”
“While he’s walking you down the aisle? After we’re married? When the grandchildren are born?”
“Eeeewww!”
“Eeewww? Grandchildren are Eeeew?”
“Of course! Aren’t they to you?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you’re just not thinking it through. And father hates the thought of them as well. Though he expects an heir.”
“Which will be difficult to provide without procreating.”
“Don’t be gross!”
“So, for ‘dear old Dad’, then, what would be the upside of us getting married?”
She paused, thinking hard.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I’m sure there is one. He’ll understand. You’re the least irritating person who’s proposed to me so far.”
“I feel so special.”
“I said ‘yes’, didn’t I?”
I avoided reminding her that I had never actually asked.
“So—those things you do to annoy him,” she said. “You’re not doing them on purpose?”
“What things?”
She stared at me blankly for a moment, her eyes wide with surprise.
“Wow,” she said. “Apparently not. How extraordinary.”
She paused and studied my face, obviously shocked that whatever strange, irritating things I did as a matter of course weren’t planned simply to drive her father insane, and were, possibly, in some way, just my natural state of being. The thought made her shudder.
“Well, suffice it to say,” she continued, “if you had one of your— you know—swelling episodes—in front of him, it would not go over well. He might actually use that gun he’s always threatening to shoot down your pants.”
“He threatens to shoot a gun…” I choked off the rest. Darts were one thing. But guns?
“One can hardly blame him, the way you are sometimes. So you don’t want to provoke him further by letting yourself get…em…erections in front of him. I mean, my goodness, Corky. You have to be the one to show some self-control. It’s not as if I can have these removed!”
Well, actually…
“So get hold of yourself!” she said. After a beat, she realized the double entendre and blanched a bit. “In a manner of speaking.” She glanced over at the car steaming in the ditch. “I mean, imagine if something like that happened every time you had a dirty thought about me. We’d be ostracized from society.”
“What society?”
“Decent society,” she snarled. “Are you correcting me, again?” she asked, the natural anger in her returning and rising to its traditional resting place.
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
She glared at me as if looking for the lie to seep through my pores and announce its very presence in song. After likely deciding I was too weak-willed to truly display any kind of controlling behavior, she turned away from me and headed back to the car.
Then she abruptly stopped.
“You’re not a gold-digger,” she said without looking at me.
“What?”
“That’s the upside for father in you marrying me.”
She turned to me and smiled; apparently pleased to have found at least one reason for her father to despise me one or more dart throws less. “You’re not after his money.”
Suddenly it struck me that the best possible reason for marrying Mindie was her membership in our exclusive club. Rich people really couldn’t marry anyone who didn’t already have their own fortune. Look what happened when John Seward Johnson, eldest son of one of the three founding brothers of Johnson and Johnson, married the upstairs maid. Scandal, dueling lawyers, and half the money gone. And for rich people, there was nothing more humiliating—or unavoidable—than scandal, dueling lawyers, and the loss of money. Sex on cheese platters was one thing, but actual marriage? Even a loveless union came much farther down the list of bad things that could happen to you, somewhere just above severe blood loss, beheading, and dismemberment. Any sane, wealthy person who married a maid, even one with a bachelor’s degree, and then had the insensitivity to die before she did, would have to expect horrific anger, contested wills, and family infighting to be the obvious outcome—even Mister Johnson himself. So why did he marry her?
Go find a picture of her on the Internet.