Bitter Sweet Read Online Free PDF Page B

what the doctor ordered tonight.’
    ‘Blow it out your ear, Pearson. You don’t thank a friend for something like this. You gonna be okay now? won’t flush yourself down the john or anything, will you? ‘I feel a hundred per cent better.’
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘I’m sure.’
    ‘Okay, then, I gotta go. I got kids to get to bed. Call me, anytime, okay?’
    ‘I will, and you do the same.’ ‘I will. See y’, Mag.’ ‘See y’, Brookie.’
    After hanging up, Maggie slouched in the chair, smiling lazily for a long time. A montage of pleasant memorie reeled through her mind, of herself and the girls in high school - Fish, Tani, Lisa and Brookie. Especially Brookie, not particularly bright but liked by everyone because she had a terrific sense of humour and treated everyone equitably, never indulging in criticizing or backbiting. How wonderful to know she hadn’t changed, that she wa still there in
Door
County
, a ready link with the past, to keeper of contacts.
    Maggie rolled her chair closer to the desk and glanced a the telephone numbers highlighted in the beam of the banker’s lamp. Fish’s, Lisa’s, Tani’s, Dave Christianson’s Kenny Hedlund’s. Eric Severson’s. No, I couldn’t.
    She sat back, rocked, thought a little longer. Finally, she rose and searched the bookshelves, selecting a thin, padded volume of cream leather stamped with imitation gold that had long since tarnished.
    Gibraltar , 1965.
    She opened the cover and saw her own squarish handwriting, with the parenthetical instruction (Save for Brookie), and Brookie’s abysmal chicken-scratching.
    Dear Maggie,
    Well, we made it, huh? God, I didn’t think we ever would. I thought Morrie-baby would catch us drinking beer and expel us before we ever graduated. Boy, we sure drank a few, huh? I’ll never forget all the fun we had cheering and dancing and driving thru all those cornfields in Fish’s pand truck with the Senior Scourges. Remember the time we stopped it and took a leak in the middle of
Main Street
? God, what if we’d got caught!! Don’t forget the choir trip and that green slime we put in Pruitt’s thermos bottle, and all the times we drove him nuts adding notes to songs, and the time we put that poster of the nude in the boys’ locker room with you-know-who’s name on it! (My mother still hasn’t found out about all the trouble we got into over that!) Prom was the greatest with Amie and Eric, and the day after out in Garrett’s Bay in Eric’s boat. (Sigh!) I sure hope everything works out for you and Eric, and I know it will because you’re such a neat couple. Even though you’ll be at Northwestern and I’ll be in Green Bay at
Beauty
School
, we’ll still get together weekends and pork out with Fish and Lisa and Tani so let’s all keep in touch... fer sure, fer sure! Take it easy on the guys in Chi-town, and good luck in whatever you do. You’re the one with all the brains and talent, so I know you’ll be a success, no matter what. You’ve been the best friend ever, Mag, so whatever you do, don’t change. And don’t forget me. Promise!
    Love, Brookie
    ,. -       ,, monologue, Maggie found herself smiling wistfully. She didn’t remember putting green slime in Mr Pruitt’s thermos or whose name they’d written on the poster of the nude. And who was Morrie-I’ baby? So many lost memories.
    She checked out Brookie’s class picture, Tani’s, Lisa’s, Fish’s, her own (wrinkling her nose in chagrin) - all of them so girlish and unsophisticated. But the one whose picture she’d really opened the book to see was Eric Severson.
    And there he was. Extraordinarily good-looking at seventeen - tall, blond and Nordic. Though the yearbook was done in black and white, Maggie imagined colour - where there was none - the startling blue of his eyes, true as a field of
Door
County
chicory in August; the sun-bleached blond of his hair, streaked like dry cornhusks; the perennial teak of his skin baked in by summers of