Best Friends Read Free Page A

“Now, why did I say that? I know he wasn’t. I owned the cassette for years, and it was one of the first films I got on DVD.”
    Roy came to his friend’s aid, if lamely. Maybe that was what annoyed Kristin. “Flynn was a lecher, though, I believe, and involved in a lot of scandals in his time. My father mentioned him.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Sam chimed in. “That’s where I first heard his name.” Sam spent a lot of time at Roy’s house when they were teenagers, and Roy’s father was always partial to him. “Hey, you want to look at They Died With Their Boots On later? I’ve always had a crush on Olivia de Havilland.”
    â€œI know,” said Roy, and as to the movie, “Sure.”
    â€œNot me,” said Kristin. “I’m sleepy.” Though you could not have told it from her alert eyes.
    Dessert had been sliced peaches in a stemmed glass filled with sparkling Vouvray, accompanied by langues-de-chat that she had baked over the weekend, but when thawed were as if new from the oven. It was after this course was finished that the brief argument about the washing-up ensued. Of course, not much was needed for the job but the dishwasher, a lately updated model no doubt selected by Sam, given its multitudinous touchpad offerings, more elaborate than the dashboard on any of Roy’s vintage cars.
    When he discerned that Kristin would be genuinely offended if he insisted further, Roy smiled to bring her back and said, “I just wanted to run that fantastic dishwasher.”
    Sam asked loudly, “Hey, remember that old joke about a guy who got his dick caught in the dishwasher? How’d that go, exactly?”
    Roy was embarrassed in front of Kristin. He answered truthfully, “I don’t remember it.”
    Sam stood ponderously against the counter, a hand on it for security, though he could hardly be drunk on a few beers. “It hinged on the sex of the dishwasher, I think. The dishwasher was human, you see, in a rest-au-rant.”
    The hesitation between syllables caused Roy to look more carefully at the man he had known for so long. Sam was drunk, probably had poured down a bit before Roy arrived, or more than that. It took quite a lot of extra alcohol with a body of his size.
    Roy was least fond of any situation in which he himself was sober and his companion was inebriated to any degree. This was worst when the latter was a woman, for it meant she was preoccupied by some personal problem that had no reference to oneself, but for which one would be blamed if present when the emotion reached critical mass. Any kind of sexual relations in this context would be disastrous, but neither was it a simple matter to escape with grace.
    No such special problem came into play with Sam, but Roy was reluctant to leave his friend alone to drink through the old movie. He wondered whether Kristin was really sleepy or just politely determined to avoid a film in which she had no interest. In the almost three years of their marriage, Roy had never seen them quarrel. Sam was too good-natured for that, and Kristin seemed too smart. Or such was Roy’s interpretation. He had never thus far come close to marriage, not having yet found that woman for whom he could forsake all others. He suspected that for a man of his temperament, being formally attached to one woman was to lose the possibility of being a friend to any, and in most cases he began and ended a romantic connection on an amicable basis and remained on good terms with former intimates for years.
    The exceptions, and of course there had been some, were unrepresentative: Usually these were errant wives, risking more than those who did not have to deal with injured or possibly vengeful husbands. It was true that Jane Waggoner threw a glass of Gewürztraminer in his face when he wondered whether they should begin to ease off, and this was in public, though fortunately in an inn fifty miles