How Loveta Got Her Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

top of her purse just a half hour before. Eunice got the kisses, but she never dreamed she’d get a baby from Flo. If she’d ever dreamed that, it would have been a nightmare. There’s not too many good ways you can inherit a baby.
    Even with Flo being the way she was, everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the boy she met. His name was Darryl Bugden, and though he had lots of charms and attributes attractive to a girl, he also had the heart and the spirit of a criminal born. Not just one who picked it up along the way, for a lark with friends, but one born right to it from the word go.
    How’d it happen? Flo was at the Minimart, the one she worked at on Long’s Hill, reading a magazine and sitting by the cash, when she was introduced to Darryl. There was no one else in the store. It was 8 p.m., three hours to go before she closed up against the scattered few customers who came in. It was mostly cigarettes and chips and the furtive magazines for total losers, that’s all.
    â€œThis here’s a stick-up,” was what Darryl said, his first words to her.
    Flo looked up and there he was, six foot four at least, with dark curly hair and a smile despite what he said to her. All those teeth were perfect.
    What’s with that, she thought, perfect teeth? That’s rare.
    He did not look threatening to Flo, but how could she know, that death would appear to her in this outfit, those teeth, those words she’d only heard on TV? It never occurred to her, and it never would have occurred to anyone, looking at that smile. Anyway, it sure didn’t happen right away, it took three years.
    â€œA stick-up?” she said.
    When she got the job, the boss said to her, “If someone comes in and says, this is a stick-up, then you just collapse to the floor in a dead faint. Piss your pants too, that’s the best. Make as big a mess as you can, breathe like you’re a spastic on the verge of a fit. Oftentimes they’ll just say, Jesus Christ!, and run out of the store and go somewhere else.”
    Somehow the boss had figured that out on his own, from what happened to him once. He didn’t plan it, it just happened to him and it worked. He sure didn’t get that advice out of the manual that came to all the new employees, from the Downtown Merchants. In that manual, it said, just hand over all the money, wordless, and do not put up any resistance. Most of these robbers are on drugs and they’re twitchy, unpredictable.
    It was the nice smile he had that kept her sitting there. There was no way she was going to fall to the floor and do the rest of that whole crazy drill. How bad could a girl look, no matter what?
    â€œThere’s no money here. Everything bigger than a five goes right down that slot,” she said.
    She pointed to the wall behind her.
    â€œStraight down into the safe.”
    Actually it was a slot in the wall that went straight into a cardboard liquor box that was on top of the safe. She could see it in her mind’s eye, sitting there full of loose money spilling over the sides. The boss long ago forgot the number to the safe so this was a money bypass. “It’s a trick,” he said, “that fools most of them all the time.”
    â€œThe safe, the combination is unknown to me,” she said.
    He smiled some more but he just stood there.
    â€œThe walls are three feet thick, and solid iron,” she said.
    The next thing Darryl did was get over the counter. He suddenly turned and slid his butt over the plexiglass that lay over top of the lottery tickets, and there he was, he twisted around and his feet landed on the floor right beside Flo. They stood there like a couple. She got scared then, and looked out the door. Maybe there’d be a customer to come in and save her, but that was not likely, maybe the old man with the cane or the fat lady for bubble gum, but what chance of that? There was no one in sight. And what