Lot Lizards Read Online Free PDF

through her teeth. This wasn't the night for it, it just wasn't the night .  
    Jenny's eyes rolled to her hand, which was spread flat on the tile floor, and saw beside it two feet in officious white sneakers. They were Dina's feet. Jenny looked up to see Dina standing with her hands on her thick hips, elbows jutting as she looked down with disapproval.  
    Dina Bonnick was the assistant manager in the restaurant. Dina Bonnick was widely despised. She was a petite woman in her fifties— somewhere in her fifties—with a tiny wasp-like waist and shapeless, rather lumpy, legs; she had a pale, withered face that was always too heavily made up and silverish hair that had been done in a strange outdated beehive sort of arrangement. She, of course, did not have to wear the uniform required of the waitresses and wore, instead, bright flower print dresses and beige stockings that were invariably wrinkled around her knees.  
    "Did you slip?" she asked in her quiet, pinched voice, after which her thin lips pressed together, emphasizing the wrinkles that branched out from them on the top, bottom and from the sides.  
    "Yes," Jenny said, getting up, "I slipped. I thought we were supposed to warn each other when there was water on the floor." She began to pick up the jagged chunks of broken plates and toss them into the trash.  
    "Those were orders, I take it?"
    "Yes, they were orders."
    Dina nodded. "They'll have to be deducted from your paycheck, you know." She cocked a penciled brow and leaned her head back just a bit in that way she had, almost as if she were daring Jenny to disagree.  
    "Yes," Jenny said, eyes closed. "I know."
    Dina left and went back to one of the coffee counters where she'd been sitting, where she always sat; she never actually did anything, she just sat at the coffee counter sipping coffee...watching.  
    Jenny turned to go back to the kitchen window and give the cook the orders again when she nearly ran into Kevin, one of the busboys.  
    "Sorry, Jenny," he blurted, stepping back, his fingers twitching nervously at his sides.
    "For what ?" she snapped, sounding more harsh than she'd intended.  
    "The water. I spilled it. I'm sorry. Really. I was gonna clean it up right away, but...well, I...I'm sorry."
    She shrugged, feeling a little sorry for the boy. He was taller than Jenny but seemed, somehow, shorter now. His boney frame seemed to have shrunk. His forehead was wrinkled beneath his head of wiry brown hair and his lower lip was tucked between his teeth. "That' s okay, Kevin."  
    He smiled nervously.
    "You might want to get a janitor to clean up this mess," she said, gesturing to the floor.  
    "Yeah, yeah, sure." His head bobbed frantically. "Yeah, I'll do that."
    He turned and ambled away clumsily and Jenny went to the window and, once again, turned in the orders to one of the cooks, a stringy haired guy in his early twenties named Arnie Hamilton, who still had an acne problem and who made her very uncomfortable because he always stared at her breasts as he spoke to her.  
    Her bones ached, her head felt as if it had been clubbed and her feet hurt from the walk to work through the snow in the heavy awkward boots Grace Tipton, her landlady, had given her for Christmas. She was sick to death of taking orders, of putting up with the travelers' impatient remarks and put downs and the truckers' leering come-ons. She longed to go home to her little girl, to her bed and her electric blanket. But she'd just started her shift and it would be hours before she could do that. Shawna, her daughter, was home with Grace, who was probably settling down on the sofa now with a cup of tea to watch a movie or one of those damned tabloid news shows she loved so much.  
    Outside the foggy windows, it was still snowing hard: big fat flakes cut through by the headlights of still more cars making their way into the dirty slushy parking lot. The falling snow was rather hypnotic as it danced and whirled in the icy wind that,