Free The Grand Tour by Adam O'Fallon Price Page A

contract for eighty-five thousand, gross, less Stan’s agent fee. Of course, another chunk would immediately go to taxes, but sixty-five thousand, or however much that left, was still a lot of money. Not enough to never work again. Not enough to move to Europe and live out his life as a grappa-swilling letch. Not quite enough to start his own bar, from which he would ban people like himself on sight. Not enough to do lots of things, but enough to not feel like a complete fool for quitting his job, totaling his car, and getting DUIey-Twoey all in the same day.
    It was enough, as it turned out, to buy a nearby house in foreclosure, in a superexurban neighborhood called the Bluffs. There was no bluff visible in the landscape, so perhaps the name referred to the cavalier attitude local banks and homeowners had taken toward the adjustable-rate mortgages that subsequently emptied the neighborhood. It turned out they were giving the things away—all you had to do was show up at auction with a roll of quarters and a ballpoint pen. Richard got the house—a fantastically ugly stucco ranch with a porte-cochere and an ornamental chimney—for twenty thousand down and two hundred a month. It was one of two occupied homes on the street, a lonely cul-de-sac that hung out exposed into the scrubby desert like the caboose wagon in a doomed pioneer convoy. At night the coyotes called and responded across miles of empty land. The desolation of the place seemed a drawback to most buyers, hence the price, but Richard loved it. If only, he thought, the other homeowner on the street would default, it would be perfect.
    ———
    The phone rang in his new living room. Groaning up from the La-Z-Boy, he picked his way across the room, covered with trash, books, and unpacked moving boxes. It was more or less the same amount of garbage and unwanted possessions he’d had in the trailer, just spaced out to fill the larger living area. The white, plastic rotary phone lay on the sofa, next to the sliding glass door that opened to the patio. He sat down and hoisted the heavy receiver, like lifting a small dumbbell.
    “Yeah.”
    “Richard, it’s Stan.”
    “Hey.” His attention remained thoroughly commanded by a
Dukes of Hazzard
episode he’d been watching on the TV; or, more specifically, by Catherine Bach; or, even more specifically, by Catherine Bach’s ass. An earlier spell hovering motionless over his typewriter had culminated in the bold decision to squander the rest of the day. If he wasn’t going to produce anything, it could at least be a choice.
    “You there?”
    “Oh, yeah.” He turned the volume down.
    “I assume you haven’t checked your email lately?”
    “Not in the last few months, no.”
    “Are you sitting down?”
    “Do people actually say that? For future reference, I’m always sitting down.”
    Daisy Duke bent over the General Lee, and he candidly imagined himself bent over her back. The exertion alone, to say nothing of the excitement, he decided, would kill him within five seconds. Just before the phone rang, he’d been considering self-abuse, a term that became more and more apt with age. “What?”
    “I said the book’s doing great. The reviews are glowing. It has critical mass.”
    “I don’t know what that means.”
    “It means everyone’s lining up behind it. I’ve seen it happen before.”
    “Okay, well. Great.”
    “You don’t understand, it’s selling.”
    “Really.” Richard clicked off the TV, and over the next twenty minutes, Stan detailed, in loving and exhaustive fashion, what all of this meant. It meant more money. It meant the other books were going to be reprinted in trade paperback. It meant interviews with NPR, the
TBR,
and a peppering of other acronyms that Richard had never heard of.
    “And you know what all this means.”
    “No,” he said.
    “Book tour. ASAP. Speaking engagements, some of them paying.”
    “Which means flying.”
    “No, I was thinking you could ride a camel