Maud's House by Sherry Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

tourists loved them, just as George said they would. I found a red crayon at the bottom of my purse and wrote MORE CARDS on an order pad, ripped off the sheet, and stuffed it in my pocket.
    The bell over the restaurant door jangled behind me. I quickly stashed my purse and jacket under the horseshoe counter. Two men squeezed their bulky shapes on to stools at the counter. I poured coffees—one black and one with cream—and set them before Amos and Bartholomew. “Afternoon, boys.”
    Freda, already making dinner salads in the kitchen, poked her head over the top of the swinging doors. “Maud Calhoun, you’re late, as usual.”
    “Traffic.”
    Freda pursed her lips and went back to filling salad bowls. “You look like hell,” she mumbled. “You need to lay off the Rolling Rock.”
    I ignored her, leaning on the swinging doors. “Been busy?”
    “Watching leaves is hungry business.”
    “Good for tips,” I said, tying on a white polyester apron. “Had to park behind Wynn’s today; she’s not doing any perms for awhile. The smell gets to her.”
    “Damn!” Freda patted her hair. She wore it swept up in the back, cascading into a fall of curls. She hated her straight, blonde hair and always said she’d die without a regular perm. Her husband Lewis Lee had never seen her without a curl in her hair. “By the time Wynn gets over morning sickness, I’ll look like something on the side of the road.”
    This latest prenatal inconvenience hardly affected me. I was told my mother’s black curls had swarmed around her head like bees. I liked to think that she hadn’t been able to control her hair either. My hair gave everything the slip—barrettes, bobby pins, braids. But to keep the health department happy, I kept trying to strong-arm my curls into obedience with a coated rubber band.
    “Well, you won’t be the only one in town,” I said tucking a curl behind my ear.
    Harping again on my haggard features and bloodshot eyes, Freda said, “We’ll all look like you. Shit.”

    Round Corners Restaurant could have been made from a kit. You could have set it up anywhere in the country, at any intersection of civilization and wild, weary highway, at any meeting place of greasy spoon and gasoline. It would have looked, smelled, operated the same. Speckled Formica table tops, large Woolworth landscapes, high vinyl booths, plastic flowers, sugar and Nutrasweet packages on the tables. If you needed to know the hours of the Dairyman’s Bank down the street, you consulted the ashtray. If you wanted a florist or needed an undertaker, you perused the back of the menu under the disclaimer: “Sponsorship of this menu is no reflection on the quality of the establishment’s wares.”
    Since the restaurant was the only entertainment in town, all romance in Round Corners was carried on there. Boys usually brought their girls to the restaurant on the first date. Couples celebrated their engagement, wedding, and anniversaries at the Round Corners Restaurant. It was there lovers quarreled over the pork tenderloin and made up over the smothered steak. It was perhaps there that she first saw his eyes wander to someone else or he heard she was moving in with Mother.
    Clientele was skiers in winter, leafpeakers in fall, summer people in summer, and Amos and Bartholomew all the time. Their wives complain that they live at the Round Corners Restaurant. They drink so much coffee they keep Brazil in business. Sometimes they sit all day on the same stool, sometimes (depending on the season and the weather) they leave half a cup standing to head into the woods and chop trees or nail down somebody’s roof or feed the stove in the sugar shack. Year after year the country’s economic muscle flopped and flexed, but Amos and Bartholomew worked no more and no less.
    “Heard they put you on the map, Maud,” Bartholomew said. The Vermont Department of Tourism had distributed this year, for the first time, fifty thousand copies of “
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