Bon Bon Voyage Read Free

or cabin or whatever it was she’d be staying in.
    â€œNot just me. Both of us,” she corrected. “They’ve got a spa and a gym and fascinating shore excursions, and the food is supposed to be absolutely—”
    â€œWhat’s this both of us business?” I interrupted. “I couldn’t afford to go on a cruise if I wanted to, which I don’t.” Smack came over and licked my hand, so I gave her an ear scratch while Carolyn told me that it wouldn’t cost us a penny. The whole thing was complimentary, except for the airfare, because the cruise company wanted her to write columns about their fancy food. Jason couldn’t go because he had a meeting, and he didn’t want Carolyn to go alone because he was a weenie—she giggled at that—and was afraid of Muslim countries and stuff.
    â€œMuslim, like terrorists?” I asked.
    â€œOf course not!” Carolyn exclaimed. “These countries are in North Africa, and if anything dangerous happens, the State Department tells Americans not to go there, and the cruise company sends us to some other port. Don’t you want to see Gibraltar? And the Spanish ports? And the Canary Islands? They’re supposed to be so beautiful.”
    â€œYeah, and what does the airplane cost?” I asked sarcastically. “You know all my money goes for meds.”
    â€œSurely you have some left from when we kidnapped that disgusting man in Juárez,” she said. “After all, I gave you my half.”
    Oh, shit! She had given me her half, and actually I did have a lot of that money left, but I didn’t want to spend it on some frigging cruise. When I told her it would be too expensive, she said Jason could pay for my ticket since he was being so mean about not going with her. “He’ll be glad to,” Carolyn declared. “Think of how much safer he’ll feel if you’re with me.”
    I doubted that. The first and last time I saw Jason Blue, Carolyn and I were half snockered on sangria, laughing and making toasts on her patio. He hadn’t seemed that glad to meet me. Since then Carolyn and I met from time to time for lunch, but I finally had to take over picking the restaurants. She was into these cutesy places full of middle-aged, dressed-up women and food that had fancy sauce splashed on everything. I introduced her to some really great hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex places where cops and workmen go to grab a bite. I even got her to try menudo , which is tripe soup, the local cure for hangovers. I have to admit she’s game when it comes to food. Everything she puts in her mouth is something she might write about in a column. She’s always asking some poor Spanish-only abuelita for a recipe, and I have to translate. Of course the places I like, they don’t have recipes. They make stuff like their mamas did—a little of this, a little of that, and a hell of a lot of jalapeños.
    All the time I was thinking about some of our weird lunch excursions, Carolyn was trying to convince me that I really did want to go on this cruise with her. “Why would I want to go on a frigging cruise?” I finally interrupted. “My knees would freeze up from sitting too long on the airplane, I wouldn’t know the languages anywhere we got off, I’d hate all the snobbish passengers, I don’t have any evening gowns to wear to the gourmet dinners, which I wouldn’t like anyway, and I’d probably get seasick and spend the whole time barfing on their fancy carpets.”
    Carolyn said, “Nonsense.”
    â€œIt’s not like El Paso’s really a seafaring section of the country,” I put in before she could tell me why my reasons for not going were nonsense. “My only experience on a boat was a trip to Elephant Butte, where we fished off the side of a row-boat with a put-put motor on the back. And someone drowned while we were up there. Think how many more people