The Quintessence of Quick (The Jack Mason Saga) Read Online Free PDF

I was born.”
    “Oh, Jack. That’s awful. How old was she?”
    “Forty-sump’m. Out on a toot, the story goes, with an old boyfriend.”
    “Jesus.”
    “Name-dropper. You’ll love the next part; the guy was my granddad’s business partner.”
    “My God!”
    “You keep doing that. Quite a little soap opera, huh? He was the boyfriend who wouldn’t marry her. Brought Pap, my granddad, home with him from World War I, and he proved quite willing to marry her and father her three children. But she never quite got the other bastard out of her system, so one night they got drunk, jumped in the ol’ Stutz and proceeded to wrap it around a tree out in the country. Left Pap with three children to raise and the other half of a pretty good cotton brokerage.”
    “How old was your mother when it happened?”
    “Fourteen.”
    “It must’ve been hell for her.”
    “Had to’ve been. Never said much to me about it, though.”
    “As far as that goes,” she said, “it can’t have been all that great for your granddad. Dealing with the aftermath of a scandal like that, in a town this size, must’ve been its own kind of hell.”
    “And again, I can only imagine what that must’ve been like for him, because, in the best tradition of a Southern gentleman, he wasn’t about to tell his only grandchild shit about what it was like to go through something like that. By the time I came along, that whole situation was dead and buried, no pun intended. Gene Debs was in the Navy and Mom was in New York, pursuing not only her dreams but those of her dead mother and soon-to-be-dead grandmother, and Pap was here, soldiering along from day to day, with only Buster for company.”
    “The baby brother.”
    “None other. He was the only one who was satisfied to stay on in Bisque, having had no interest in going to college. Pap tried to groom him as his understudy in Gene Debs’s absence, but putting it kindly, Buster turned out not to be cut from the same cloth as Pap. Then the war came along and he was gone too, working in the Bell bomber plant over in Marietta, taking his own mini-scandal along with him.”
    “What do you mean, ‘mini-scandal’?”
    “I mean his lovely wife, Cordelia. Beautiful and gregarious, and too much of both qualities for Buster to handle all that well. All kinds of people have fallen for her, including her high school English teacher, never to be seen again. You’ll be seeing for yourself before long.”
    “So they’re back here now. He’s the stock-car racer, right?”
    “Yep. Turns out he did have talent, after all. Going as fast as possible in a perpetual left turn.”
    “Any money in that?”
    “Not much, unless you win all the time, which he doesn’t. Finishes in the top ten a fair percentage of the time, though, and writes the whole thing off to Redding Chrysler-Plymouth.”
    “Which he owns.”
    “Together with the bank and Chrysler Corporation’s finance division. His inheritance from Pap came along at a convenient time, just as Nash and Hudson merged. Until then he was the man to see if you wanted a Hudson, which not nearly enough people around here did. That, of course, was of slight consequence to him, as long as he could put one of those steel suppositories, better known as a Hudson Hornet, on a racetrack. So now he’s upgraded, but only slightly; most people in Bisque drive Fords or Chevrolets.”
    “Sounds like Buster’s a man who’s found his calling,” Linda observed.
    “Indeed he has. And Bisque’s finally found a Redding it can love.”
    “What about your granddad? Don’t tell me he wasn’t loved, as big a man in this town as he appears to have been.”
    “Respected, yes. But loved? I doubt anyone could’ve convinced him of that. Pap was a lot of things, but a ‘man of the people’ wasn’t one of them. Buster, on the other hand, plays that role to the hilt. He’s even got the race announcers calling him ‘the man from Bisque.’ He’s given this weird little