Beauty: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

she said to Parks. “I’m just looking.”
    “I’m fine,” he said. “This is a cemetery that matters. I worked here. Met my second wife here.”
    “You liked it.”
    “I don’t know liked. I was still young enough to make a go of it, but it wasn’t easy at first.”
    “After Pittsburgh.”
    “After Pittsburgh. I left things in Pittsburgh. Didn’t you ever have an ‘after Detroit,’ Carol?”
    Dividing the blocks in her neighborhood, the “village,” people called it, were alleys behind the houses. It was a clean neighborhood in those days, but the houses were small and the lots narrow. The brick of the storefronts in the village was stamped tar paper. In the alley behind her and her father’s house, boys met to work on motorbikes and then motorcycles and then cars. They had a garage that could hold one car at a time. Carol found those boys and hung around when she was so much younger that they couldn’t even hate her for being a girl. Over the years she learned about motors and then everything to do with cars. When she was still much too young, she made runs to the parts store for the boys. After a while, the parts store guys gave her a little something, and the boys gave her a little something. When she was older, she realized that was business, and she knew she liked business. When she was older still, she realized she would fall in love with one of these boys.
    She didn’t need to call up any of that, least of all Dominic. She said, mostly to herself, “I never had any befores.”
    Parks, a good guy, said gently, “That sounds like a song, Carol.” Then he laughed and said, “I wish I’d never had any.”
    Carol nodded to be polite. She hardly ever thought about Dominic. When she did, she ached like she was missing everything. Right now, however, she was looking at her last burial, and after that, no, she was not going to get everything, but she was going to get what she was allowed to want: her own company. She wanted that a lot.
    She said to Parks, “So the lines are still inside?”
    “If you wanted a fish stick, we could go in right now, pull out a block of frozen, saw off a shingle, run that through the piece cutters and onto the shake pans as the belts move the patties under the oil spray and then the breading sifters. On through the ovens. Are you hungry, Carol? Do you mind me calling you Carol? I’m fine with Ms. MacLean if you prefer.”
    “I’m not hungry, but I am glad to get an idea of how the line travels. And yes, thank you, please call me Carol.”
    What she almost said, and decided not to say, was “Please call me Carol instead of Beast.” What her own guys, Baxter especially, had said out loud in the conference room in New York, that had stung more than usual. But she needed to focus on business, period. She sure as hell couldn’t afford to get distracted and give Baxter a last-minute reason to renege on his promise. She was so close to getting her own company that, just now, here in the dark in front of Elizabeth’s Fish, feelings that she’d shut up and forgotten seemed bursting to get out. She was full of her dad raising her alone and her looking out for him like she looked out for the boys in the alley, and then learning to do business the same way, looking out for everybody at Baxter Blume, and doing it as the Beast. And this was the Beast’s last appearance. She wanted to hold her breath until she had her company, and then with her first free breath, then she’d smile, and the Beast would be gone.
    Parks startled her to attention. “And in the new plant, the lines are shinier and have bells and whistles.”
    “But it’s basically the same line in both plants, right? Fish sticks are fish sticks?”
    Parks nodded and said, “Fish sticks are fish sticks.”
    Carol said, “I’m going to stand here for a while by myself, get this perspective on the new plant. Why don’t you head home? We’ll map things out in the morning.”
    Parks handed her a ball of keys and