Empire Of Salt Read Online Free PDF Page A

sugar. Three strips of bacon and two links of sausage rode the top, all covered in syrup. By the way he inhaled it, Natasha was convinced it was the best thing her brother had ever eaten. When he finished, he looked around for something else to eat. Lucky for him Maude saw his glum face and brought him another helping of what she called Lazlo's Toast. From then on, as she moved about the restaurant, the boy's eyes never left her.
    Auntie Lin found a spot at the bar and had wheat toast and coffee, her sparkling gaze taking in the new people and the new place.
    As the family ate, customers began to trickle in, including a group of four elderly tourists in shorts, black socks and T-shirts. They were as old as Gertie and Maude, but acted much older. The difference was plain in the way the two old women goofed around with each other, compared to the two at the table, clucking and fussing over each little bit of life that was thrust before them, the cleanliness of the forks they were shining with their napkins and the way their husbands were sitting on their chairs. The final straw was when one of the women, her hair the color of an electrified smurf, tried to send her eggs back for the third time, claiming they weren't scrambled hard enough.
    Gertie threw both hands in the air and headed back to the kitchen, muttering something about knowing where a bucket of spackle was. And that was that. The tourists saw neither hide nor hair of Gertie, and Maude patently ignored them, whenever she strode by. They finally stood, tossed a twenty dollar bill on the table, and left.
    It was just about then that Patrick said to Natasha. "Why don't you and Derrick go and explore? Me and Auntie Lin need to talk with these ladies for awhile."
    Natasha sat for a moment staring at her father, stunned that he'd just treated her like a child. She was eighteen, she'd graduated high school, and was as much as an adult as anyone else in the restaurant, with the exception of Derrick, of course. She glared, counted to ten, then jumped up from the table and stomped out of the restaurant. Derrick followed close behind. She'd moved across the country because she'd known that her brother would need her. If it wasn't for him, she'd have never come.
    She fumed until she hit the outside air. As soon as the door closed behind her, she wished she'd never left the restaurant. The temperature had risen to at least a hundred without a breeze or cloud on the horizon. "Oven" was the word that came to her mind. She turned to Derrick, whose face had slackened from the sheer weight of his breakfast.
    "You gonna make it?"
    "Ugh," he said.
    Natasha looked longingly at the door. She wanted badly to go back inside but knew that if she did her father and Auntie Lin would once again probably send her away. As hot as it was, unless she was going to burst into flames, she wasn't going back inside.
    She gazed at her surroundings, musing that the town of Bombay Beach more closely resembled some war-torn East European town seen on a television news snippet. She'd been to Sandy Hook on the New Jersey coast. It was a seven mile stretch of perfect beach with the nearby town of Highlands seemingly transported from the suburbs. Food franchises and stores were the same there as the malls around Philadelphia. Even the people were the same, just more tanned and windblown, the cool sea air scouring their skin clean of big city grime.
    Yeah, she'd been to beach resorts before and this place was no beach resort. Everything here was the opposite. Of the people she'd seen, the extraordinary old women Gertie and Maude included, none of them wore clothes she associated with success. The beach was a putrid stretch of rot. The water was the color of old soda. The buildings had either collapsed beneath the weight of their own decay or were on the way. And everything seemed to be encrusted with salt.
    The Space Station Restaurant was probably the best-constructed building in sight. Rows of trailers, some