Round Robin by Joseph Flynn Read Free Book Online

time to work something out.
    But with even more glee than usual, the weatherman said the cold was now due to return tomorrow night.
    There might even be snow.
    Robin clicked off the set and pulled the covers over her head.
     

Chapter 5
    Robin’s interviews the following morning were less unusual but no more productive than the previous day. The woman was technically competent. She was also a lesbian. Don’t worry about that, she’d said, because Robin wasn’t at all her type. She would have to hurt Robin, however, if Robin ever made a play for any of her girlfriends. The man didn’t want to harm Robin, he wanted to save her. He was a part-time minister, and he wanted to know if he took the job, could he use Robin’s laundry room for baptisms? He’d be honored to wash her sins away first thing. Right there in her laundry sink.
    Robin was so depressed she couldn’t muster the energy even to defend herself. People would take shots at her and all she could do was take their orders and serve them their food. Everybody figured that Robin was setting some sort of trap for them, sucking them in by allowing them to take their little digs before she tore their heads off. So nobody pushed it too hard with her.
    Still, Robin was glad Tone had decided to stay away that day.
    David Solomonovich, however, showed up after the lunch rush.
    “Hey, mama,” he said, “you sure are lookin’ —”
    Then David got a good look at her.
    “ Awful,” he finished. “Just terrible.”
    “How nice of you to notice,” Robin said dully.
    The realization that maybe he’d actually hurt Robin stunned David, made him feel worse than any insult he’d ever received at Mimi’s.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, his fourteen-year-old voice small and hollow.
    “What do you want, David?”
    “Pastrami.”
    “On rye?”
    “What else,” he said. “Wonder Bread?”
    He hoped Robin would rise to the bait, but she didn’t. David watched her work. She plodded through the motions and didn’t say a word to him. He thought what he was seeing was terrible. Robin was too young and vital to abandon her gift for vitriol. The world was losing something important here. It would be like ... like Michael Jordan retiring at thirty.
    Robin gave David his sandwich silently, accompanied by nothing more than a dull stare.
    David took one deep breath, another and then a third.
    “Are you hyperventillating?” Robin asked.
    David was just building up steam for what he had to say.
    “I just want you to know,” he said, “that whatever’s wrong, I’ll do anything I can to help you. And I may be just fourteen, but you’d be surprised what I can accomplish.”
    David’s pledge of help, friendship and, implicitly, love reduced Robin to tears.
    Not that she let anybody see her cry. She couldn’t afford that. She turned, walked through the kitchen door and left work early. On the way home, she cried.
     
    When Robin got home she found a man looking around her building. She’d first spotted him from up the block. He was bent over peering into the basement windows. He duck-walked from one to another. In that compressed posture, he made her think of an anvil, massive and dense, and his huge crew-cut head seemed a fitting platform on which to beat red-hot iron into horseshoes with a hammer and tongs.
    As she came closer, the man stood up and Robin saw he was really huge, well over six feet tall and wide enough to cause an eclipse if he ever got airborne. The giant saw Robin approach, gave her a momentary stoic glance, then turned away and started walking toward the back of Robin’s house.
    She figured him for a burglar.
    It was a measure of her mental state that she decided to stop this guy by herself. She knew better than to call out. She’d need surprise on her side. She’d jump on the bastard from behind. He was big, but she wasn’t exactly Twiggy herself. Her weight would knock him down and she’d beat his head into the sidewalk with her bare hands.
    Of