Otherwise Engaged by Eileen Goudge

Author:Eileen Goudge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2005-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Dude, you okay?”

Skip, staring sightlessly at the receiver in his hand, dragged his head up to meet his brother’s concerned gaze. “I’m fine,” he answered in a strange, hollow voice.

“The old lady giving you grief?”

Skip shook his head. “Nah. She just called to see how I was doing.”

“Yeah, right.” Mike gave a snort. “I’ll bet she was checking up on you, making sure you weren’t out getting laid.”

“Thanks for the insight,” Skip replied sarcastically.

“Trust me, I know women.”

“All you know,” Skip said, “is where to put it.”

Mike grinned as if it were a compliment. “Something you, my man, have clearly forgotten.”

Skip watched his brother cross the living room on his way into the kitchen. The house, in one of the newer subdivisions Mike had built, was decorated in what Skip could only have described as Early Bachelor, epitomized by the brand-new, top-of-the-line leather recliner nestled beside the hand-me-down sofa from their parents’ den. On the wall above the sofa hung Mike’s most prized possession: a framed poster from the first Woodstock concert, which he was too young to have attended but which held an almost mystical draw for him. Mike might be a harddriving contractor whose partying was limited to a beer or two in the evening, but somewhere on his soul was etched the sixties anthem: drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

He hadn’t always been like this. In high school, he’d been a little wild, sure, but once he and Jessie got serious he’d settled down and started thinking about the future. Something in him was irreparably broken the day she walked out on him; he was never the same after that.

Skip watched his brother moving about the kitchen that opened onto the living room. Mike grabbed a beer from the fridge, popping the top with the bottle opener bolted to the wall beside it. He took a long swallow before pausing to regard Skip across the butcher-block counter, with the air of a guru about to impart some life-changing piece of wisdom.

“My advice is, don’t show all your cards,” he said. “You want to keep her guessing. Nothing like a little uncertainty to bring a woman to her knees.”

Skip couldn’t remember a time when his older brother hadn’t known what was best for him. Go for it, dude, you know you want it, Mike would urge when Skip, as a teenager, was reluctant to make a move on a girl…or flash a fake ID…or cut school. He’d rarely followed that advice, yet at some level hadn’t he envied his brother’s freewheeling ways? There’d been no wife to remind Mike of his responsibilities when he decided to go into business for himself. And look at him now, so busy he was turning away work.

“The last time I took your advice,” Skip reminded him, “I ended up with eighteen stitches in my head.” He fingered the scar over his right eyebrow, a legacy of the time, when he was ten, he’d popped a wheelie, at Mike’s urging, and gone flying over the handlebars to land on his head on the pavement.

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