Mad River Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

who’d recommended her for the job in the first place.
What’s the matter with you? Can’t you ever stick with anything?
she could hear her sister admonish. Followed by,
I should have known. You’re such a flake
. To be further followed by,
When are you going to stop fooling around and start taking some responsibility? When are you going to go back to law school?
To be hammered into the ground with,
Who quits school two credits shy of graduation to marry some jerk she barely knows?
And in case she was still breathing,
You know I’m only saying these things for your own good. It’s high time you stepped up to the plate, took control of your life. Are you ever going to be ready?
    Jamie pulled out one of the stools at the long bar and signaled the bartender for a drink. Just wait till Cynthia hears about tonight’s little fiasco, she thought, decidingto be bold—opting for a glass of the house Burgundy over her regular white wine spritzer. She peered through the dim light, swallowing the large room in a single glance. It was a long rectangular space that spilled out into a sidewalk patio. A series of banquettes ran along the interior west brick wall, the bar directly opposite, with dozens of tables occupying the center and front sections of the room. The tile floor amplified the noise of the crowd, a crowd that consisted largely of young women much like herself.
    Where were all the men? Jamie wondered absently. Aside from a nearby table of forty-somethings who were so caught up in their discussion of redesigning the company logo that they hadn’t even looked at her when she squeezed by in her tight, low-rise Juicy jeans and even tighter pink sweater, and a morose-looking man with an overgrown Tom Selleck mustache nursing a drink at the far end of the bar, there were none. At least not yet. Jamie checked her watch again, although only minutes had passed since her last peek. It was probably too early for the men to be out, she realized. Seven o’clock meant that if a man saw a woman he liked, he’d feel obliged to buy her dinner, instead of only a few drinks.
    The bartender approached with her wine. “Enjoy.”
    Jamie took the glass from his hand. She gulped at the wine as if it were air.
    “Tough day?”
    “My boyfriend’s in the hospital,” Jamie said, instantly feeling like a walking cliché. She was confiding in the bartender, for God’s sake. How pitiful was that? Except maybe if she told the bartender her sad tale of woe, she wouldn’t be tempted to tell her sister, and then maybethe bartender, who was tall and cute and had an interesting scar below his right eye, might ask her to wait around until he finished his shift, and they’d sit by the fountain at the end of the street, and he’d turn out to be sensitive and funny and smart and … “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”
    “I asked if your boyfriend was sick.”
    “No. He had an accident at work and needed surgery.”
    “Really? What kind of accident?”
    “He tripped on a piece of carpet on his way to the john and broke his ankle.” She laughed. How ridiculous was that!
    “Bummer,” the bartender said.
    Jamie smiled and took a long sip of her drink, waiting until the bartender moved away before looking back up. So much for funny and smart, she was thinking, deciding that no matter how lonely or desperate she got, she would never go out with a grown man who said
bummer
.
    She stole a glance at the man with the Tom Selleck mustache, but he was hunched over his drink, protectively. He looked up briefly, caught her gaze, then turned his head away, as if to underline his disinterest. “Mustache looks fake anyway,” Jamie muttered, staring into her glass, temporarily mesmerized by her reflection in the deep purple of the wine.
    In the next instant, she saw herself walking up the front steps of Good Samaritan Hospital and asking the regal-looking black woman at the reception desk for directions to Tim Rannells’s room. “He was scheduled