30 Pieces of a Novel Read Online Free PDF

helping out with,” and his older daughter says, “When did we ever do that?” and Sage says, “That’s how I like them best too—as a special treat. Here, I think I’ve overindulged on them, not that we’re allowed to have all we want … but you know, if a customer doesn’t eat one and you’re very hungry, because you build up an appetite running around in this job,” and he says, “I can’t imagine someone not eating his second popover unless one of the diners with him swiped it. But that reminds me—but you’re probably too busy, you wouldn’t want to hear it,” and his older daughter says, “What?” and Sage says, “It’s true, I’ve some orders in the kitchen waiting, and all with popovers, if you can believe it, excuse me,” and goes, and his older daughter says, “What were you going to say that reminded you, Daddy?” and he says, “Oh! When I worked as a soda jerk, or fountain man as I was also called, in a resort in New York, I got so sick of eating ice cream, or maybe not so much from eating it as from dealing with it, that’s the reason I don’t like it today,” and his wife says, “Everyone likes ice cream; one has to be scarred by it to develop an aversion to it. For you it was the cigarette butts and other filth in it on the plates coming back to you, but you should finish your own story,” and he says, “Your mother’s right. You see, I had no customers of my own, just made all the concoctions from the orders the waitresses gave me. And then they handed me their dirty dishes to stick through a window to the dishwasher behind me. And they looked so ugly with all the things the customers had done to their ice cream, the butts and stuff, sometimes stuck standing up on top of the sundae where the decorative cherry had been, that I got sick of it, ice cream melting all over and around this—well, excuse me, but this shit, and that’s why I hate it today,” and his wife says, “At this place you always help yourself to a spoonful or two of ice cream, so you can’t hate it entirely,” and he says, “At this place they always have at least one very unusual exotic flavor, which we always get unless it’s with peanut butter, and they make the ice cream themselves, so I’m curious,” and his daughter says, “Oh, yeah,” and he says, “Yeah, I’m curious, as to how, let’s say, peppermint raspberry sage might taste. Not ‘sage,’ that’s just because it’s our waitress’s name, but you know what I mean.”
    He likes everything about her. He’s tried to find a profile or some part of her he could dislike, a bump on the nose, for instance, or not find faultless, but it’s all faultless: nose, lips, eyes, hair, teeth, legs, arms, fingers, nails (no crap on them and not choppy or uneven), breasts, hips, stomach from what he can make out, waist, rear … the name, though: Sage. Not faultless. Speaks well, big bright smile, pleasant personality, chipper, friendly, though no fake, doesn’t give them the bum’s rush, as his dad used to say—she has other tables, is obviously busy, yet stops to talk, listen, suggest, answer the kids’ questions generously, laughs a lot but not heehaw-like … it would be nice, moonlight, cool night, the whole works, just a comfortable unsticky night, the air—smell of it, he means; sounds of the insects—not the biting of insects, though; so you slap on some repellent—even the scent of that on her; especially that scent, perhaps—walking with her, that’s what he’s saying would be nice: after work, around the grounds, in town for a movie, whatever the town: Southwest or Northeast or Bar Harbor, or for pizza and beers anywhere, back to the rooms they stay at on the property, but now he remembers that server last year saying the