The End of the Pier by Martha Grimes Read Free Book Online Page A

and elegant, wore simple suits in cold weather, simple dresses in warm. Today she had on a frosty blue linen dress. Maud always studied her dresses and accessories. To the shoulder had been pinned a gold brooch, and she wore a gold bracelet; one long, bare arm rested on the counter, but unlike Velda’s, it was pale, untanned. This alone would have sent Dr. Hooper rocketing in Maud’s esteem: she was clearly a woman who had other things on her mind besides Nantucket. Maud also liked the way she sat at the counter rather than sitting in one of the dark, high-backed booths, the way the other women who came in on their own did. It bespoke to Maud a certain confidence and carelessness, that Dr. Hooper couldn’t be bothered worrying over being a woman alone. For despite the entire feminist movement, Maud had seen absolutely no change in the mouselike withdrawal of any woman from fifteen to fifty, the caginess they felt over being in a restaurant alone, as if it were a porn movie house.
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    Since Maud considered herself terminally shy, it had been nearly two months before she got up the nerve to speak to Dr. Hooper. She could never keep up the friendly chat of Charlene or the constant complaining of Shirl as they moved down the counter and among the booths. Except for Miss Ruth Porte, who seemed so frail and quiet it would have been shameful not to be able to converse with her, Maud hardly exchanged a sentence with the customers; could not be forced to even under the constant agitatingof Dodge Haines, who considered himself La Porte’s lady-killer and never seemed to look at any woman above breast level. “You’d think my tits was my eyes,” Charlene would say, but in such a salacious tone that you knew she enjoyed it. Charlene had a big smile and big breasts and bestowed herself on everyone like a basket of fruit.
    All Maud could do to make up for her lack of conversation (except for her book talks with Miss Ruth) was to smile, and her smile wasn’t like Charlene’s—no wide red lips and flash of bleached teeth. Her smile was little more than a slight upward hook at the ends of her mouth, a shy smile. She tried to smile a lot to make up for her silences—which were at least appreciated greatly by Joey and, she thought, by Dr. Elizabeth Hooper—because otherwise the people of La Porte might think she was putting on airs. It was her college education and her being favored so much by Miss Ruth Porte, also educated and able to talk to Maud about books, that she was afraid might make people think she was uppity. But even though Maud’s smile was constrained, she knew it was pleasant. An old boyfriend (a hundred years ago, when there were such things) had told her she had the prettiest smile he’d ever seen. It was the smile of a little kid, of an infant, even, the smile of someone who’d just learned and really meant it. It was the most sincere smile, he said, he’d come across. Maud had forgotten his name, this high school boy; but she remembered the grave look on his face, the effort that had gone into describing her smile just right.
    It was a compliment she had tucked away in her mind like a petal in a book and looked at again and again for thirty years. Only Chad, who’d told her she looked more like thirty than forty-seven; and Sam, who had told her (to her utter astonishment) she was the most comfortable person to be with because she was as serene as a nun (when she wasn’t mad)—only they had ever said anything as nice. Ned had never paid her a compliment she could remember.
    Maybe it was her “serene” smile that made Dr. Elizabeth Hooper react in kind. It was probably because Maud was the only one in the Rainbow (except for Ulub and Ubub) who hadn’t tried in some way to wheedle out of her why she kept coming through La Porte. Charlene had found out Dr. Hooper was a psycho-whatever because a cousin of a