Hotel Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

quarrel—altercation, fight, trouble—inside a house. He left, and I asked Maud who lived at the Silver Pear. She said it was owned by Gaby and Ron von Gruber, but she couldn’t imagine them having an altercation. They both wore silver pompadours and were tall and thin like pussywillows.
    We were walking back to the Rainbow Café, Maud having taken her lunch-break time to walk up and down Second Street with me and the Sheriff. I asked her if she’d ever eaten at the Silver Pear and she said yes, a couple of times with Chad. Maud was divorced andChad was her son and she told me this rather sadly. Chad had gone off to school and I knew she missed him. But at that point, the sadness of adults was a subject I did not want to think about too much; I didn’t want to believe, I think, that they actually suffered. Their world was supposed to be different. If they suffered, they must have efficient ways of dealing with suffering that were totally unknown in my world. That was one of the advantages of being an adult: you could neatly package unpleasant and painful feelings, wrap them up, toss them on a delivery truck, and send them to be dropped off here and there along Misery Mile. Not like me. Not at all. I had to endure my bad feelings.
    “Was it good?” I asked, after this turnover of thoughts of Maud’s possible unhappiness. I meant her meal at the Silver Pear.
    “No. The food was good, I guess, but the portions were minuscule. They have this nouvelle-cuisine type of French food. ‘New’-cuisine isn’t really food, it’s the illusion of food. A carrot curl, a sprig of escarole, a triangle of smoked fish in a puddle of pink sauce. Your mom’s such a much better cook it hardly bears mention.”
    I filed that compliment away to tell my mother, as the Silver Pear is always being held up as the smartest restaurant within fifty miles. “But it’s the favorite place with the lake people,” I said, hoping she’d continue talking about how bad it was, so I could amplify the compliment.
    This lake I spoke of is an entirely different lake from Spirit Lake. It’s on the other side of La Porte, and the lake people are a race apart: rich, handsome, tan all year, living in fabulous houses, and when they’re not swimming and boating they’re skiing. Maud herself lives in a little house by the lake, but on the near side, the unfashionable edge.
    Maud said, “If the Hotel Paradise were just five miles closer to the lake, you’d be overrun with business.”
    Business, our business, has not been good. Spirit Lake is pretty much a has-been resort, a little village that once depended on its railway station for tourists and has seen a lot of them. Now Spirit Lake suffers a lot because people no longer depend upon trains; they drive automobiles and can whiz right through Spirit Lake on their way to somewhere else. There used to be over a half-dozen hotels; ours is the only one left now.
    As Maud and I walked past the window of Prime Cut, we could see Shirl in there looking like a drowned rat. Since she hadn’t goneunder the dryer yet and still had to have her hair rolled by Alma Duke (the owner-operator), I knew she wouldn’t be back in the Rainbow for at least another hour. Often she got a manicure too. We stood outside the window and waved at Shirl. She pretended not to see us, as she probably didn’t want to let on anyone had seen her in this state.
    I mentioned to Maud she’d probably be in there another hour and asked if I could sit in a booth. She said yes, of course, and that she’d have a cup of coffee with me, since she hadn’t had her lunch yet—that is, she added, “if I won’t be interrupting your writing.”
    Now, that’s what I like about Maud and the Sheriff. Neither of them assumes that because you’re twelve years old you have nothing to do but twiddle your thumbs until the movie opens. I was, actually, going to the theater on First Street after this hour in the Rainbow. I loved movies. I especially love