The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer by Anne Tyler, Monica McInerney Read Free Book Online Page A

The thin one took his cap off finally and looked inside it. Then he put it back on his head.
    She could step into the café and speak to Mabel, ask if she knew of a job and a place to stay; or she could head straight for town and find something on her own. In away, she preferred to fend for herself. It would be sort of embarrassing to confess she’d been abandoned by her husband. On the other hand, maybe Mabel knew of some marvelous job. Maybe she knew of the perfect boardinghouse, dirt cheap, with kitchen privileges, full of kindhearted people. Maggie supposed she ought to at least inquire.
    She let the screen door slap shut behind her. The grocery was familiar now and she moved through its smells comfortably. At the lunch counter she found Mabel leaning on a wadded-up dishcloth and talking to a man in overalls. They were almost whispering. “Why,
you
can’t do nothing about it,” Mabel was saying. “What do they think
you
can do about it?”
    Maggie felt she was intruding. She hadn’t counted on having to share Mabel with someone else. She shrank back before she was seen; she skulked in the crackers-and-cookies aisle, hoping for her rival to depart.
    “I been over it and over it,” the man said creakily. “I still can’t see what else I could have done.”
    “Good gracious, no.”
    Maggie picked up a box of Ritz crackers. There used to be a kind of apple pie people made that contained no apples whatsoever, just Ritz crackers. What would that taste like, she wondered. It didn’t seem to her there was the remotest chance it could taste like apple pie. Maybe you soaked the crackers in cider or something first. She looked on the box for the recipe, but it wasn’t mentioned.
    Now Ira would be starting to realize she was gone. He would be noticing the empty rush of air that comes when a person you’re accustomed to is all at once absent.
    Would he go on to the funeral without her? She hadn’t thought of that. No, Serena was more Maggie’s friend than Ira’s. And Max had been just an acquaintance. Totell the truth, Ira didn’t have any friends. It was one of the things Maggie minded about him.
    He’d be slowing down. He’d be trying to decide. Maybe he had already turned the car around.
    He would be noticing how stark and upright a person feels when he’s suddenly left on his own.
    Maggie set down the Ritz crackers and drifted toward the Fig Newtons.
    One time a number of years ago, Maggie had fallen in love, in a way, with a patient at the nursing home. The very notion was comical, of course. In love! With a man in his seventies! A man who had to ride in a wheelchair if he went any distance at all! But there you are. She was fascinated by his austere white face and courtly manners. She liked his stiff turns of speech, which gave her the feeling he was keeping his own words at a distance. And she knew what pain it caused him to dress so formally each morning, his expression magnificently disengaged as he worked his arthritic, clublike hands into the sleeves of his suit coat. Mr. Gabriel, his name was. “Ben” to everyone else, but “Mr. Gabriel” to Maggie, for she guessed how familiarity alarmed him. And she was diffident about helping him, always asking his permission first. She was careful not to touch him. It was a kind of reverse courtship, you might say. While the others treated him warmly and a little condescendingly, Maggie stood back and allowed him his reserve.
    In the office files, she read that he owned a nationally prominent power-tool company. Yes, she could see him in that position. He had a businessman’s crisp authority, a businessman’s air of knowing what was what. She read that he was widowed and childless, without any close relations except for an unmarried sister in New Hampshire. Until recently he had lived by himself, but shortly after his cook started a minor grease fire in the kitchenhe’d applied for admission to the home. His concern, he wrote, was that he was becoming too