Read Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me for Free Online Page A

seen her do before. She started crying. Not hard, not loud, mostly just large, gleaming tears collecting in the corners of her dark eyes. She didn’t wait for my answer. “C’mon,
    McCain, let’s go, all right?”
     
Four
     
    It is a strange summer for me. The girl I’ve loved since grade school is in Kansas City, hiding out from the scandal of running off with our town’s most important lawyer.
    Married lawyer, I should add. Two kids and all. Lawyer and wife have made up. The beautiful Pamela Forrest is, however, pretty much gone forever. Mary Travers, the girl I should have fallen in love with—z much as you can determine something like that, I mean—is getting married to the man whose father owns the local Rexall plus a whole lot of other property in the county. She still loves me, or so she said the last time I saw her, but I’ve screwed up her life too many times as it is.
    And the other day I was sitting in the backyard of my folks’ place and I started to study them. Not just look at them. Study them. And see how old they’re getting. And I felt scared and sad and lonely because they’re such good people and I sure don’t want them to die. And Mrs. Goldman, my landlady, about whom I’ve had more than a few erotic fantasies, went to some kind of cancer meeting in Iowa City—her sister recently died of cancer—and she came back with those sticker decals you put on your medicine cabinet mirror, Cancer’s Seven Danger
    Signals. And put them on every medicine cabinet mirror in the house, including mine. And I started thinking about it. I mean, she meant well. But I started thinking about it. That I could die, too. That it wasn’t impossible for a twenty-four-year-old to pass over.
    And then at the grocery store last Saturday, everybody crowded in there buying potato chips and beer and Canada Dry mixes for highballs.
    I saw a lot of the kids I’d graduated with from high school. And they all had wives and kids in tow. And looked happy. And grown up. And I thought of what a mess my life was and how in a lot of ways I was still a kid and sometimes that was all right but other times it made me ashamed of myself. Maybe I’d never be Robert Ryan but at least I could be an adult like my dad. He had to quit school when he was in tenth grade to help support his family. I guess that grows you up pretty fast.
    And now here I am with Kylie, whom I have this sort-of stupid half-assed crush on even though she’s married and I sure don’t want to get involved in anything like that, and we’re just riding the prairie night with the top down in my red Ford ragtop, taking the long way home at her request, out on the blacktop that runs between the woods and the river, the moon high and round and silver-gold, and the cattle and the horses lowing in the farmyards, and a lone motorboat out on the river, its wake phosphorescent as it cuts the moonlight, and I’m wondering if Kylie feels as lonely as I do at this moment.
    She said, “This feels good.”
    “Yeah. It does.” Though I wasn’t quite sure what “x” referred to.
    “Everybody should have a convertible.”
    “Can’t disagree with you there.”
    “Even the pig shit smells sort of good tonight.”
    “Yeah, I was just thinking that myself. Boy, this pig shit really smells good tonight.”
    She slugged me on the arm.
    She didn’t say anything for a time, we were just cruising along the river, and there was this houseboat then and even from here you could hear the Latin music and the people all laughing, and she said, “I wish I was out there.”
    “On the houseboat?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “How come?”
    “Oh, I’ve got my reasons.”
    “What you’ve got is some sort of secret, don’t you?”
    She laughed. “Cliffie Sykes, Jr.,
    Herpetologist. Samuel McCain,
    Mind Reader.”
    “So you going to tell me what it is?”
    “No. Because if I do I’ll get sad again.
    And I don’t want to be sad for a while.”
    “I don’t blame you