I'm Your Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

our captain and unbuckled her safety belt. She stalked toward the rest room and the flight attendant followed, still apologizing.
    â€œThat poor woman,” Sheila said.
    â€œI hope the cyanide doesn’t eat through her skirt,” I said. “What were we talking about?”
    â€œYour ex-wife. Where is the stunning Sydney these days?” Sheila asked, injecting the adjective with enough venom to fatally poison half of our fellow travelers.
    â€œIn Italy. Procuring artists for her gallery or some such nonsense. She’ll be back in a couple of months, I think.”
    â€œOh, no,” Sheila said, obviously doing the math in her head.
    â€œUh-huh. While we’re in Eau Claire for your wedding—”
    â€œThe hag from hell could be there, too,” finished Sheila with a frown. “Doing everything in her power to make your visit the most miserable experience possible. Our best man won’t be in best spirits, that’s for sure. I’m sorry, Blaine. But hey, there probably won’t be a wedding anyway, since I’ll be too busy and Josh will be so infuriated that he’ll leave me. And you won’t have to worry about me, so you can focus your energy on battling Sydney, the hound from hell.”
    â€œHag from hell,” I corrected.
    â€œYou said she’s a bitch, not a hag,” Sheila reminded me.
    â€œTomato, tomahto,” I responded in a singsong voice.
    â€œPlease don’t say tomato or tomahto when that woman gets back from the rest room,” Sheila implored. “I don’t understand why Sydney’s still milking you for money. From every horrifying account I hear, she has one of the most successful small galleries in Chicago.”
    â€œShe enjoys making me sweat,” I said. “She’s just like her father; they both love power. She has a little power over me, and she luxuriates in reminding me of it.”
    â€œIf you could just be honest with your parents—”
    â€œYou know why I can’t,” I said. “My mother.”
    Again I watched Sheila bite her lip. I knew what she wanted to say, and the problem was that I agreed with her. For as long as I could remember, my mother had used her health to avoid anything unpleasant. I was convinced that most of her maladies were imaginary, but she’d had a mild heart attack after my divorce from Sydney. That, at least, hadn’t been faked, and my father and brothers placed the blame squarely on me. If my family found out I was gay, and anything happened to my mother . . . As estranged as I was from them all, I would never forgive myself.
    â€œHow are your brothers?” Sheila asked, seeming to read my mind.
    â€œI think Shane is having an affair with a waitress,” I said. “As for Wayne, who knows?”
    Giving their sons rhyming names had been the only “cute” thing my parents had ever done. In fact, it baffled me that, as staid and unapproachable as they were, they’d managed to produce offspring. I’d always hoped that in one of the many deathbed scenes my mother enacted to her guilty and captive audience over the years, she’d confess that I was the result of some midlife indiscretion. It would explain so many things.
    Both of my brothers worked for my father at Dunhill Electrical, a fate I’d managed to escape. Since I’d be twenty-eight in May, I calculated that Shane must be forty-two. Being a married father of three hadn’t slowed him down any. Even though I thought his wife was shallow and self-absorbed, I found his serial adultery disgusting.
    As for Wayne, he was eleven years older than me. Though I was the one they called “the accident,” I tended to see Wayne in that category. Actually, I saw him as a sociopath waiting for the right moment to rain down destruction on Eau Claire. For as long as I could remember, he’d had a rifle and a Confederate flag in the back of his pickup truck, though to