Grub by Elise Blackwell Read Free Book Online

more time to write. What she felt every morning and every evening as she neared her computer could be described only as pleasure. All day the store was filled with writers shopping instead of writing, writers complaining of writers’ block, writers lecturing each other about the agony of creation or the fickleness of their muse, writers browsing the shelves and griping that they had no time to write. Her days were filled with writers not writing, and she had told more than one of them go home and write.
    “No one’s making you be a writer,” she’d told a regular one afternoon, “You shouldn’t do it if you don’t enjoy it.”
    Many of her happiest hours were spent alone with sentences, trying them out in different forms, leapfrogging words and phrases across each other, finding combinations of adjectives and nouns never before placed in proximity. She knew that she mystified her friends whenever she turned down an invitation to a party or out to hear music, but, well, she was who she was.
    She reminded herself that her room at her parents’ house—which she would have to reclaim from her father, who had been banished there for snoring—offered a serene view of the Hudson. She’d set up her computer before the window and finish the work on her book. Then she could figure out how to make her way in the world.
    Margot finished shelving ten copies of a new novel about a group of women in a sewing club, each, according the flap copy, coping with her own threads of tragedy. It was time for her break when she finished, and she stepped out to get a little sun on her face.
    It was still summer, still hot, but the mugginess had subsided, and Margot could feel and smell fall in the drier air. She sipped a cup of tart lemonade from the bookstore café as she walked the block to a courtyard where she liked to sit.
    “Miss Yarborough!” a man called out as she was about to slip through the iron gate.
    Margot turned but saw only a swarm of indistinct bodies and faces.
    “Miss Yarborough, I’m glad to run into you.”
    Now Margot recognized the voice. She found it charming that Jackson Miller called her “Miss Yarborough” as though she were a character in a Victorian novel. He was accompanied by the pretty girl who worked at the restaurant across the street and sometimes stopped by to browse the cooking magazines.
    “My roommate, Doreen Maud.” Jackson swept his hand from Doreen to Margot and back. “And my agreeable and most kind new acquaintance, Margot Yarborough.”
    After they had exchanged greetings, Doreen excused herself to get to work. “You people of books must wonder how I exist in a world of dishes and food,” she laughed.
    “On the contrary,” Margot answered. “I kind of envy you.”
    Doreen stretched her mouth into a long line, then said, “Because of all the agents and editors who ‘lunch’ at Grub?”
    “I didn’t mean that. I envy you because you seem to live a real life among real people.”
    “If you can call waiting tables real life and Grub’s patrons real people, you may have a point. But that’s all debatable.”
    “I’m telling you, Doreen, you could be a writer.”
    Jackson’s comment finalized Doreen’s departure.
    “Funny you should envy her for not writing,” he said to Margot, “because I’ve been trying to convince her to try her hand at it.”
    “Would that be easier for her than waiting tables?”
    “Likely harder, wouldn’t you say?”
    He held the gate wide and ushered her into the courtyard. She chose a shady bench, and they sat, Jackson moving closer to her as they talked.
    Margot drained her lemonade and set the cup beside her feet. She brushed her shoes lightly over the moss that grew between the bricks, then leaned over to touch its velvety texture. “It depends, I suppose, on several things.”
    “Of course,” Jackson said. “And I’m not claiming that Doreen has any particular inclination to write. But I’m not sure she’s got any for cooking