Making Promises Read Online Free PDF Page A

feeling the power of the automobile under his hands and the way it purred over the road—it was meditation, pure and simple.
    Part of the journey was on a two-lane highway that wound around the brown hills that bordered the coastlands. He’d left early, so traffic was moderate, and the rumble of the pavement under the deep-grooved posi-traction wheels was soothing. Between that and Springsteen on the stereo, Shane was in his happy place by the time he pulled off at what was essentially a roadside attraction.
    Casa de Fruta used to be merely a fruit stand in the middle of nowhere, but the founders had added a restaurant and some novelty shops, and the effect was charming, like finding Tom Bombadil’s house in the middle of a hazardous journey. For the last few years, the adjoining property had housed the Renaissance Faire for eight weeks in the fall, and as Shane pulled up into the dusty gravel (he paid the extra five-spot for the VIP lot) he thought again of Tom Bombadil’s house and The Lord of the Rings .
    Because Gilroy after a long, hot, summer was a dusty, dry, graceless hunk of land, but the Renaissance Faire turned it into a storybook with the boundless magic of humanity’s capacity for whimsy.

    Shane was wearing jeans and a The Who T-shirt (the old bands were coming back—he’d always known they would!), but as he parked the car and made his way through the parking lot, he felt supremely selfconscious. Almost everyone else was in costume.
    The costumes for the men ranged from leather pantaloons tucked into knee-high boots with a leather over-vest and a linen undershirt to basic cotton trousers (loose and floppy with a drawstring waist and ankles) and a large, blousy, big-sleeved tunic, usually with a V or tied neck. Most men had a vest on over their tunics, and everybody had some sort of hat—
    leather, raffia, corduroy, linen. The variety of headgear materials alone was impressive, and that didn’t even include the styles. The colors ranged from loud to bright with a dash of understated and the occasional neutral, and the assortment of pieces to any given ensemble was as varied as the men themselves.
    And that was just the men.
    The women did all of that with a combination of skirts and laced bodices—usually with bosoms flapping out of the bodices and sometimes even with thighs showing from hoisted, banded skirts. Shane had to admit he had always enjoyed looking at a nice bosom, and at this point his dry spell had been long enough that he didn’t care which team he was batting for, he just wanted to play. The squishy handfuls of boobage being pushed into touchability were just as enticing as the occasional glimpse of bare chest that he saw from the young men. Anything, dammit— anything just as long as he knew he had the option of human touch sometime in the near future.
    A happy family passed him: mom, dad, teenagers—a boy and a girl—all dressed to the nines. The more-than-plump mother was holding two grade-schoolers by the hand—also in costume. Mom’s floppy bosoms were not as graceful as those of the college-aged girls whom Shane had passed on the way from the car, but her adoring husband still made her stop so he could “fluff” them anyway.
    Shane was glad his sunglasses hid his rather wistful look at Happy Ren Faire Family. He liked them—by the end of the day, the little ones would probably be exhausted and whiny, but as he watched the older boy swing his little sister in the “princess dress” up into his arms, Shane couldn’t help but think of Deacon’s little family back at home. He was part of that, he thought resolutely. He was buying his princesses—both Benny and Parry Angel and even little baby Lila—a truckload of princess 22

    crap. Hell, he’d even spring for one of those Robin Hood hats for Drew.
    He was going to be the indulgent uncle in that happy family if he had to spend all of that useless fucking money sitting in the bank on the Renaissance Faire alone.
    His