Best Friends Read Online Free Page B

get the idea immediately, and neither of us will ever mention it again.”
    Was this an example of the kind of delicacy that characterized their marriage and was perhaps essential to its success? Roy was impressed. “All right.”
    â€œBring a blanket to wrap it in,” said Sam. “So the brass won’t get scratched. Kris will already have tossed the bubblewrap.”
    â€œGood idea.” Roy intended to take the machine straight from the Grandy house to Robin’s. Not only did he not drink enough coffee to give the Stecchino the work it deserved, but his brother-in-law swallowed gallons of the Starbucks product daily and would surely be comforted by the limitless availability of latte at home, especially with the audit threat looming. Ross also remained a prodigious smoker of cigarettes. How he had lived to the age of fifty-one was a miracle. Roy sometimes reflected that he himself was the only man he knew whose habits were healthy, and yet he was one of the few without familial responsibilities.
    He had intended to visit awhile longer with his friend, but Sam was anxious for him to get going, so as to reach the Grandy house while there was no chance of encountering Kristin, who would soon be leaving the bank and driving to the hospital before visiting hours expired.
    â€œI’ll make it up to you, kid,” said Sam, rolling his eyes as he thought of a suitable reward. “Next time I’ll set you up with my day nurse. She couldn’t be cuter: natural red hair, turned-up nose…”
    Sam’s idea of what attracted Roy was seldom Roy’s own. Cuteness, for example, seemed a kind of infantilism to Roy, who had never been drawn to those who demonstrated it, even when he was quite young. In school and college, Sam had dated some cheerleaders, more than one of whom returned his interest though he was not, despite his size, a football player or in fact any other kind of athlete. He was even engaged for a short time, early on, to a girl named Honey Fitzgibbon, whose retroussé nose (always a winner with Sam) was covered with freckles and who walked with a bounce even when barefoot on sand. Kristin was nothing like her predecessors.
    â€œYou do what they tell you here,” Roy scolded. “Remember, you came to them for help, not vice versa.” The sermonizing was not like him. If he did more of it, Sam would likely jeer. “Okay, I’m on my way. Consider your problem solved.”
    Having accepted the mission, he carried it out with more care than Sam had asked. He took the stairs instead of the elevator on the way out, should Kristin understandably have left work early. Driving the car, he used the rear exit from the parking lot, which debouched on to a back street used mostly for deliveries. He was again driving the Alvis.
    The Grandys had bought an existing house with an agreeable stone façade that Sam considered not pulse-quickening enough by his standards; but as yet, so far as Roy knew, the idea of renovating the exterior had not come into play. Kristin might put up with her mate’s extravagances of everyday living, but there were limits. Perhaps with this espresso-machine incident, a general pullback might be instituted, which Sam hoped to forestall by getting rid of the device.
    The driveway was surfaced with gravel, more chic than blacktop but threatening to the paint on an automobile, vintage or otherwise. Sam saw this as a desirable check on those who might otherwise speed up it. So as not to offend Roy, who for his taste always drove too fast, he explained he meant the drunken or stoned teenagers who theoretically menaced prosperous neighborhoods, at least in old television movies. Despite what seemed a general naïveté, Sam regarded everything with a certain irony. Roy saw Sam as more complex than himself.
    Roy considered himself pretty much an open book, though women seldom failed to be amazed when they heard that. What he meant was he