Matchpoint Read Online Free PDF Page A

throat.
    He was a good-looking man, around fifty years old, clean-cut, well dressed, with perfect, deep-mocha skin and a commanding voice. Single. I wondered why Grandma had never matched Mayor Robinson. It was unlike her to let a single, middle-aged man with money go matchless for long.
    “What are you going to do about the wackos, Robinson?” shouted a man to my left.
    “I heard you gave those pagans permits to camp out all over town. What do you have to say about that, Wayne?” a lady in a green sweater set said.
    “They’re putting up a yurt camp in the playground in the Main Street park,” Bridget whispered to me. “They say the chakras of the path are really strong there.”
    “Who are they?” I whispered back. “Where did they come from?”
    “They say aliens are living under this mountain and are coming out to take those nutcases away with them when the end of the world happens,” Herbie announced. “Do you have any idea what that’s going to do to my pie business? Pie season is coming, Wayne. What are you going to do about it?”
    The mayor scratched his nose and seemed to think about Herbie’s pie problem. The room erupted into murmurs, everyone worrying about how aliens would hurt their businesses.
    “They call Cannes ‘the Sacred Mountain,’ ” Bridget whispered to me. “They say we’ve been living on a whole passel of Martians.”
    A movement in the entranceway caught my eye. Spencer Bolton, dressed in black sweatpants and a large black hoodie, skulked past and tiptoed up the stairs, like a burglar. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. Nobody else in the parlor noticed him. They were caught up in their worries about aliens and yurts.
    “I don’t believe it,” I said, watching him climb the stairs.
    “Me either,” Bridget said. “Aliens and the end of the world. Cannes used to be a sleepy town.”
    The mayor cleared his throat, and the room was dead silent, waiting for his response.
    “Barbra Streisand,” he said, his big voice resonating in the room. “She said it best in
Funny Girl
.”
    I heard the pipes rumble, the sound of my toilet flushing. When I got my hands on Spencer, I was going to wring his
GQ
neck and punch him in his metrosexual face. What was he playing at?
    “ ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world’!” Mayor Robinson shouted, making me jump in my seat. “Would Barbra be happy?”
    I didn’t know if this was a rhetorical question or not.Nobody moved in their seats. Herbie’s mouth was open, a half-eaten bit of sandwich out for everyone to see.
    “I hate when people say ‘Hello, everyone,’ ” the mayor continued. “Who’s ‘everyone’? Everyone is not people. I’m not everyone. Barbra is not everyone.”
    Grandma leaned over to me. “No dumber man ever walked the earth on two legs,” she muttered in my ear.
    Out the window, I saw Holden’s truck drive by. My heart skipped a beat, and my stomach fluttered. The last time we went out, we got to second base and were sliding into third when he got a phone call and rushed away into the night. He sent me flowers to apologize, but I hadn’t seen him in nearly two weeks, and I was jonesing for the tall, hot man of mystery. And his hands. He had great hands. Especially when they were on my breasts.
    I leaned forward and, before I realized what I was doing, grabbed one of Frances Farian’s coconut sour cream fudge bars off the coffee table and shoved it in my mouth. I had a moment of pure sensual pleasure as the fudge bar settled onto my taste buds, but it was quickly followed by a searing hot pain that shot through my teeth and into my brain. I clutched Grandma’s knee for support, my eyes squeezed shut against the agony. I heard her
tsk-tsk
.
    “I’m not saying a word,” she said diplomatically.
    The mayor finished his crazy speech, and the meeting dissolved into chaos, with people forming into groups. Grandma was right. It was just a matter