The Guy Not Taken Read Online Free Page A

our father had won a brand-new car, which would be given to the next person on her list if Jon failed to immediately provide her with our father’s most recent contact information. “I gave you everything we’ve got,” Jon said, just like our mother had instructed.
    “Doesn’t your father want a new car?” the woman asked. Jon, who’d been the only one home when our father’s Audi sedan got repossessed, said, “Yeah,” and the woman had said, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s wrong to lie?” Jon had hung up the phone, walked through the kitchen, past our mother (“Jon? Who was that? Is everything okay?”) into the garage and onto his bike. Mom spent the next two hours either on hold or talking in low, furious tones to the woman’s supervisor’s supervisor. When it started to get dark, she threw me the car keys and pointed toward the driveway. Nicki, who had the night off work, rode shotgun. We drove for an hour and finally found Jon at the country club, slamming a tennis ball into the backboard with a borrowed racket. The night was dark and humid, but the courts were brilliantly lit, empty except for my brother, as we pulled up beside the courts. “Jon?” I called through the open window. “Are you okay?” There was no sound but the crickets’ chirping and the thud of the ball against the wood.
    “Get in the car!” Nicki yelled. “I’ll give you beer!”
    “Nicki!” I said. “You are not giving him beer!”
    Jon yanked the car door open, threw himself into the backseat, and slammed the door without a word. He didn’t say anything to any of us for the next week.
    Nicki, on the other hand, seemed to relish the calls. “Hello-o-o?” she’d begin, lipsticked mouth smiling, eyelashes fluttering, as if the caller could be one of the half-dozen boys who’d flocked around her that summer. Her face would darken as the collection agent of the day began his or her pitch. “As one of us has undoubtedly informed you already, Jerry Krystal no longer lives here,” she would say. “And furthermore, I find it abysmally rude of you to persist in what I see as simple harassment!” She took great pleasure in pronouncing harassment in the English manner, with the accent on the first syllable: har assment. Jon and I would gather around to marvel at Nicki’s phone manner and she, obligingly, would ham it up. “To think that you people see fit to continue pestering innocent children in light of our father’s unfortunate and precipitous departure . . . are you familiar with the recent ruling of Sachs versus Engledorf!”
    Generally, the caller was not.
    “Wherein a large collection agency was sued for the sum of seven jillion dollars for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, after they made the poor child feel so guilty about not knowing his father’s telephone number that he turned to a sordid life of crime . . . yes, that’s correct . . . and don’t call back!” Nicki would slam the receiver down in its cradle.
    “My pride wins again!” she proclaimed, breaking into an exuberant boogie, bony elbows akimbo, skinny legs bopping over the floor.
    “Nicki,” Mom would say sternly, “those people are just doing their job.”
    “And I,” said Nicki airily as she strutted up the stairs in herruffled miniskirt, with her Friendly’s uniform hanging over her arm, “am just doing mine.”
    •   •   •
    By the middle of August, the dry spell showed no signs of breaking. Heat lightning crackled through the sky every night, and we’d wake up to the sound of thunder, but the rain never came. One Monday night, Nicki and Mike, her boyfriend of two weeks, were in the family room with the videotape of Jaws II. I was huddled in my customary corner of the couch, curled up near the glow of the reading lamp with a scholarship application that had come in the mail that morning, trying to figure out how I could spin my father’s six months in ROTC in a manner that would convince the Veterans of