Homepage
Login
Profile
BookClubs
dmBox
Read Ebook: Garrity's Annuities by Mason David Ray Illustrator
Font size:
Background color:
Text color:
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page
Ebook has 67 lines and 6016 words, and 2 pages
I can't tell you what it was she did. Neither can Garrity. Hell, he didn't even know she'd done anything! He kissed her good-by at the port gates and went on his way, and she went back to work in the port medical office. As far as any of us could see, the Garrity plan was well under way.
It wasn't six months before I saw the thing starting off. That was when I was invited to Garrity's second wedding. It was in Terra City, and when he asked me to come down with him for a witness, I assumed it would be the girl he had been busily courting before he went to Serco. But when I walked into the marriage registry office and took a look at the girl, I got a clear, horrific idea of just what Katha had done to Garrity.
He didn't think anything had been done to him. He was all smiles. He brought the girl toward me, proud and possessive, grinning all over his face.
"This is Mary Collins," he told me, and I kept on looking, not saying anything. She smiled, and shook hands, and I could tell by her expression that she knew exactly what I was thinking.
Unfortunately, I couldn't say a word about it to Garrity. There was always the faint possibility that I might be wrong, in which case I could make a lot of trouble by saying a few words. The words were there, though, straining to get out. When he said, "Mary Collins," what I wanted to say was, "No, it isn't. It's Katha."
Because it was. After I watched the girl long enough, all the way through the marriage ceremony, then down in the elevator and out into the street, I became dead certain.
There was a brown mole on Katha's arm. Mary had it, too. And there was a look about the eyes--well, there could only be one Katha.
But when I tried to say something to him, he brushed it off.
"Sure, Mary looks a little like Katha," he agreed with me. "But there are all kinds of small differences. Things a man finds out as he goes along. Look, I'm very fond of both of them. I know the difference. You're just confused by the slight resemblance."
The clincher was the problem of how Katha had reached Terra City ahead of Garrity, to begin with, and whether there was still a Katha in Serco. I asked a man off a ship fresh from Serco and he told me Katha hadn't been there for some time. No one knew where she'd gone, but she had said she'd be back.
And Arnel could be Katha, too. Arnel had a mole in the right place. So did Lillian. And Ruth. And Virginia.
Yes, Garrity married every one of them. Six girls, six planets. It took him a while, and by the time he got as far as Ruth, he was going to a lot of trouble to arrange his shipping runs so he could make the full circuit. But every so often I'd hear from him, or run into him, and there would always be a new one.
The Garrity plan was going fine, but it lacked that one ingredient he had counted on--variety. Every one of those girls was Katha.
Each one of them gets a share of Garrity's pay--a big share, from the looks of it. Each one of them keeps a nice place for Garrity and, when he comes into port, he eats and sleeps as well as any honest groundwalker. And each one of them has a small fat baby boy, of whose exact age Garrity never seems to be quite sure. Two or three of the kids seem extremely advanced for their ages and they were all born fairly close together, which was enough to make Garrity as proud as a rooster.
And Garrity seems to be the only one who can't tell.
But I'm not going to.
I won't drive myself batty trying to figure out how she'd be keeping me fooled.
Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page Prev Page