Free My Best Man by Andy Schell Page A

young for the rest of but only because my mother has had not only a face-lift, but hand-lift also. My late father’s golfing buddy, Bud Orenstein, plastic surgeon, tried his experimental hand-lift surgery on mother and it actually worked. Of course, she has little scars at wrist points, but those are covered by gold bracelets cut to a fit so that they never move from their camouflage position.
    My mother is secretly relieved that Matthew and I have up, she tells me. It’s much easier to talk to her friends about she explains, now that I’m living with a girl down in Dallas. whoever this Amity is, she is good enough for my mother. said is you should bring her up here to visit sometime. It’s” that I meet her.” She smoothes her auburn hair with her left
    “Why in the world is it important you meet her?”
     
    She places the dish of curry dip on the platter and spreads the crudit6s around it. “She could be the beginning of something new and wonderful for you.”
    My mother, like Bart, like so many people, thinks I just haven’t found the right girl. She doesn’t believe that anyone is gay. She thinks that Liberace has “a rare form of masculinity” and that Richard Simmons is just “playing a role.” She thinks if I’ll just get on with it, I’ll be happy.
    If all learning was by example, perhaps I would. The day after my father killed himself, she sweetly instructed the maid to take his Cadillac, the very one that had put him to sleep, and return it to the dealership for credit. And a month later, she used that credit toward the purchase of a new car for her new husband, my new stepfather, Donald, a retired general in the air force who fought in the Korean War, as well as in Vietnam. He’s sixty-something years old, but has the body of a forty year old. He’s handsome, in a John Wayne kind of way, though his hands look as if they were transplanted from a gorilla. I suspect the reason he still has a full head of hair is because he’s not given any of it permission to fall out.
    They met at a golf tournament at the country club It was one of those mixer things where you draw your partner’s name from a golf hat. Donald, whose wife had succumbed to cancer just six months prior, drew my mother’s name. When she identified herself, he went to her, kissed her hand, carried her clubs to the cart, and from the way she tells it practically hit every shot for her along the eighteen holes. My biological father, from a fine family that taught him every rule of etiquette known to the civil world, had to be prompted to accomplish even the simplest gesture, such as holding a door open for my mother. He was a man’s man, and he had little patience for women. So naturally, when my mother met Donald, she attained the nirvana never offered by my father: the state of bliss that comes from surrendering every decision to someone else
     
    who then makes you feel as if the decision is yours. I think she’ crazy. Golf is already a stupid game, and I can only imagine ridiculous it gets when someone is hitting your shots for you. she put it in no uncertain terms: “I don’t care if Donald’s collar as blue as your father’s blood,” she told me, after announcing elopement. “He’s the best man for me at this point in life.” “What is her family like?” my mother asks.
    How can I answer? Whenever I mention her family, dodges me. “I haven’t met them yet.”
    “All in good time,” my mother says, picking up the tray vegetables. We join her husband in the great room. General left his living quarters in the retired officers’ village of the air to move into my parents’ (mother’s) house on the edge of country club. How could my mother bring this carpetbagger our lives? He looks so comfortable, sipping his glass of scotch the fire, his feet on the needlepoint-covered ottoman, his boots on. “This isn’t a bunch of crap from Levitz,” I want to “My grandmother did that needlepoint, so take your boots