One More Thing Read Online Free Page B

Tim.
    Yes, said Lynn.
    “I love you, Timmy. It’s just … I only knew you for nine years. And I’m young here. You know? I have other things to do besides dinner-at-Grandma’s.”
    He got it. And he got her, too, more than ever, and maybe for the first time.
    “I love you, Nana,” said Tim.
    “I love you, too,” said Nana. “Gotta go.”

Romance, Chapter One
    “The cute one?”
    “No, the other cute one.”
    “Oh, she’s cute too.”

Julie and the Warlord
    “Okay,” she laughed after three complicated cocktails. “Now, you, sir …”
    “Yes.”
    “You, sir … Now … I am … Okay. I feel like we’ve only talked about me. But I don’t know anything about you. Other than that you’re very, um, charming and, well, very cute, of course. Ha, don’t let that go to your head! Shouldn’t have said that.”
    “Thank you.”
    “But I feel—okay, if this is my—well. Okay: what do you do?”
    “What do I do? You mean what is my job?”
    “Sorry, I hate that question, too. It’s like, is this a date or an interview, right?”
    He finished his bite of sauce-soaked broccolini and answered, but she didn’t hear him clearly.
    “Hmmmmmmmmmm? All I heard was ‘lord.’ ”
    “Yes.”
    “Ooh! Okay, this is fun. Are you a … landlord? Because I do not have the best history getting along with landlords. My first apartment—”
    “I’m not a landlord.”
    “Are you … a … drug lord?” Julie said, stroke-poking the side of his face with her finger. “ ’Cause that could be a problem.”
    “No.”
    “You’re not … 
the
Lord, are you? Because I haven’t gone to temple since my Bat Mitzvah. Ha, don’t tell my grandma!”
    He laughed politely. She could tell he was laughing just to be nice—and she liked that more than if he had laughed from finding her funny. A nice guy: now that would be a real change of pace for her.
    “Then what kind of lord
are
you, anyways, eh?” she asked with an old-timey “what’s the big idea” accent. God, she was a bit tipsy, wasn’t she?
    “I’m a warlord.”
    “In-ter-est-ing! Now, I don’t know exactly what this is. But I want to learn. So: what exactly … is … a warlord?” Julie asked, her chin now resting playfully on a V of two upturned palms. “Educate meeeee.”
    “Okay. Can you picture where the Congo is on a map?”
    “Kinda,” she exaggerated.
    “This is Africa,” he said, pointing to an imaginary map in the air between them. “
This
is the Indian Ocean.
This
is the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This
is just regular Congo.”
    “What? Hold up—”
    “I know—that’s just how it is. I didn’t name them,” the warlord laughed. “Anyway.
This?
All
this
, here? This is what I control.”
    “So you’re like … the governor of it?”
    “No. There are areas of the world where it will show up on your map as a certain country. But in reality, no government is in control of that region, in any real way. They cannot collect taxes. They cannot enforce laws. Do you follow?”
    Yes, nodded Julie.
    “The people that
are
in charge are the warlords. They
—we—
bribe, kidnap, indoctrinate, torture, and … what am I forgetting? What’s the fifth one? Oh, kill—ha, that’s weird that I forgot that one—the population of any region that falls above a certain threshold of natural resources but below a certain threshold of government protection. It’s not
exactly
that simple, Julie, but, basically, that determines where I’m based. Once those conditions reach that level, me and my team, we show up and terrorize that area until the entire population is either dead, subdued, or, ideally, one of our soldiers.
Ideally
ideally, dream scenario? A child soldier.”
    “That does
not
sound legal,” said Julie, trying to stall for time so that she could object properly and intelligently, which was going to take a second, because she had had a couple of drinks already and had not anticipated having to debate a