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

around everywhere, like one of the wise men.”
    “I hate flying.”
    “So what? Everybody hates flying. Listen, we’ve been getting calls. There’s real interest. Do you know how rare that is? Usually you’d be screaming at three deaf retirees in the Topeka Books-a-Million. Do you hate money, too?”
    Richard did hate money, but he hated not having it more. And the amount of money Stan estimated was startling and had a persuasive quality. It would be enough to see him through another couple of years, maybe even pay off his mortgage. Commerce, Stan said, was a cruel taskmaster. He might never have the chance to cash in like this again. Did he want to go back to bartending? Richard imagined talking to the same stiffs, the same horrible bums who came in and bought their beer with quarters they’d dug out from beneath someone else’s couch cushions. They got drunk and eventually tipped with the only thing they had that was worth giving: their absence from the bar.
    “Okay,” he said. “But listen, I drive whenever possible.”
    “Have you ever heard of Ambien? Get some.”
    ———
    He hadn’t heard of Ambien, but his foreman friend in Mesa said he could get some, no problem. That they would make flying easy. Over the next month, he became better acquainted with his publicist, Dana, a loud, merry woman he’d had two cursory conversations with months earlier, who suddenly wanted to chat every day. Could he block off three weeks for a tour? He checked his nonexistent calendar, filled with all his nonexistent obligations, and found he could. Great, she said, we’ll kick it off at Spillman College, a money gig. And did he want a student escort?
    He bought the thirty-dollar suit. He called Eileen again.
    “Hello?”
    “Hey, it’s Richard.”
    “Hi.”
    He looked down at the itinerary Dana had sent over. “I’m sorry about that last conversation.”
    “It’s okay.”
    “No, it’s not. But listen, they’ve got me on a book tour. I’m gonna be in New York on the twenty-seventh. I’m doing a reading and talk at Argosy, then a cocktail party somewhere. I was hoping I could see you, maybe get some dinner.”
    The intervening pause was almost comically long, but Richard was penitent and silent. He read the names of the western cities on the list—
Spillman, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pomona, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City
—over and over to himself, an incantation of sorts, trying to keep his mind clear. He’d learned long ago that the best way to ensure something didn’t happen was to consciously hope for it. The only time good things happened in his life was when he hadn’t hoped for them to happen (Cindy’s conception) or when it was something he’d hoped for, but then it didn’t happen for so long that he eventually forgot he’d ever cared (the book). He’d stopped following sports on this basis, finding that any team on which he focused his diseased mojo—the Giants from 1975 to 1982, for example—would immediately get injured en masse or die in a plane crash or at any rate suck in perpetuity until he stopped giving a shit.
    Finally, Eileen said, “Yes, that would be nice, I think. Call me when you’re close, and we’ll firm up plans.”
    Richard put the leash on Victor, opened the sliding glass door, and walked out into his backyard, as he thought of it, though really it was just the desert. The only rough property demarcation was a small arroyo that began fifty or so feet away. Victor liked to pee in the arroyo and smell the desert wildflowers that bloomed on the edges, and so they went there. Cars were just visible up on the nearby highway, speeding away from Phoenix, and who could blame them? The last stragglers of the rush-hour push to the exurbs, they always seemed sad to him, chasing after something that had already passed by long ago. The empurpled sun clung to its mantle over the desert horizon, and he felt his heart was the same: tired and bruised at a late hour, but still