Colonel Rockford called from Iowa. He was planning on visiting Palm Beach, having heard about my semi-palatial house-sitting gig. I said, "Any time."
"You remember Skip?" Rockford asked like I had been diagnosed for Alzheimer's.
"Yeah, he's been living in Laos."
"He's back now. Got broken-hearted over some Thai girl. She left him for a guy in Germany."
I laughed mercilessly and Rockford was quick with reproach. "What's so funny about that?"
"Nothing, only that Thai girls are such experts at breaking men's heart it's a wonder they don't come with a warning tattooed on their bodies."
"That;s never happened to you." Rockford has the greatest respect for my acumen with with gentler sex.
"Never." I didn't want to disappoint Rockford's expectations, after all we do business together, but I did tell him about a love-crazed Frenchman hunting for his girlfriend in Pattay. "She had obviously left with another guy. No forwarding address. He runs into a girl who looks a little like her ex- and persuades her to take him to her place to play at being his girlfriend. Unfortunately her boyfriend was there and told the Frenchman to get lost. He refused and searched the room, thinking his ex- might be hiding in the closet, then he sliced his wrists. The doctors stitched him up and the police took him to the French Embassy."
"Poor crazy froggie." Rockford holds a deep-rooted compassion for the broken-hearted, having suffered after Nona walked out on him 25 years ago. "I know how he feels."
I'm glad I've never felt that way." I had less problems telling a lie than the truth when it comes to affairs of the heat. "I love and I leave. To me they're all the same."
"Yes, the wanderer," Rockford crooned from his porch in Iowa. "I get around."
Adn that was funny coming from a 60 year-old Colonel living in the cornfields, but listening to corn grow has to be better than paddling a canoe in Cedar Rapids.
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