Free Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt Page B

of Arcadia.
    So autumn of 1978, he returned. Things back to normal, all irritants and indignities at a low volume, humming beneath the surface, for the most part … Dillard, long abandoned by her husband, was semi-functional then, though letting her boy Christopher run wild—we see how that ended up. Jerene and Duke had made a happy home. It never ceased to strike him as odd how their progeny rallied round him at family occasions and called him “Uncle Gaston”; it always sounded strange to his ears, aged him a few decades. He hated kids. Although he had mentioned all the brood in his most recent will, giving them each $20,000 when he kicked the bucket. See? Uncle Gaston loved you, he just didn’t want to see or deal with you or get to know you in the least. Beauregard, a bright fellow, going to Duke University as he had done, then going to seminary at Davidson, peddling that Christ-in the-sky claptrap to the yokels across the Union County line (beyond the pale) in Stallings, N.C. The two young ones, Joshua, that little fruitcake, and Jerilyn, who is her mother’s clone with less smarts and personality. And Annie—she was the smartest, come to think of it, but willful and self-ruinous. He chuckled—wonder what side of the family she got that from?
    Seven minutes to the reading. Norma set these things up for him. Gaston wasn’t quite sure how this old friend whom he had broken with innumerable times kept crawling back to insert herself into his life. She was the number dialed when he couldn’t get a cab and was too drunk to drive. She was the pocket picked—admittedly years ago—when debts and canceled credit cards left him without money for breakfast. When he complained of his publishing house’s apathy in setting up readings, it was Norma, super-spinster, to the rescue, setting up small but well-attended events all across the South. He owed her a great amount for her services, her keeping his life on the rails, but the payment she wished for, marriage, a permanent association—heck, she’d be fine with affection and being seen in public together, being identified as a quasi-couple—that he would not give her. He felt his cell phone vibrate. And that would be Norma. Reminding him that in five minutes he had to give a reading. Just in case he wasn’t at the bookstore but had detoured to a bar. Which would have been the better idea …
    But I’m a creature of the old manners, the old courtesies, Gaston assured himself, as he opened his eyes and took in his surroundings. Another once down-at-heels mill town subsumed into the Charlotte metastasizing sprawl—McMansions, six-lane parkways through deforested fields where they had yet to build the development that justified the highway, identical strip malls, Panera Bread, Old Navy, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn, P. F. Chang’s, arrayed in characterless malls, a poor man’s Florida with brick sidewalks and pastel awnings. Amid the bourgeois boom was the Antiquarian’s Bookshelf in Plunkett, North Carolina, a little family-run independent store that hung on. And Gaston Jarvis was here to read from his new work, move some product, press the mottled and antiquated flesh of his antiquated readership of the Antiquarian’s Bookshelf. He leaned toward the glove compartment—even this activity at his weight was a reddening strain—where he found his flask and retrieved it, sipped from it.
    I’m too nice, saying yes to everything, he thought. He always yearned to be a curmudgeon, aimed for it, a Sheridan Whiteside whose rudenesses and insults to his loyal following could become the stuff of literary anecdotes told for a century on the order of Faulkner’s snapping at his annoying offspring, No one remembers Shakespeare’s daughter, or H. L. Mencken inscribing hotel-room Bibles with With compliments from the author .
    Gaston watched a van pull up before the bookstore, in the handicapped spot. Out came the enfeebled and disabled, a lady in canary yellow with two