Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: Mount Pleasant Read Online Free PDF
Author: Don Gillmor
Tags: Fiction, Literary
small and cheerful and warm, and waited in line as others claimed their absurdly priced orders. The woman at the cash was French, with the girlish slimness the French managed even in middle age. She turned and plucked a smallish dark cake from the shelf, delicately placed it in a box, closed and taped the box, then put a ribbon around it and deftly tied an elegant bow. She handed Harry his cake and smiled. He handed her a $50 bill with genuine regret, and left carrying the box by the ribbon, then worried that thecake would slide around inside and get damaged, so he put one hand underneath the box and cradled it like a baby.
    He walked east for half an hour, past a cloud of Asian smells, churches offering yoga classes, window displays of bondage gear. He suddenly realized how hungry he was and approached a sausage cart, the vendor with his dismal toupée and homely wife, their faces a map of Eastern European grief and a boredom that had centuries of peasant solitude behind it. The woman opened her gap-toothed mouth, an unspoken query.
    “Sausage,” Harry said, holding up one finger.
    Some of these people, he had heard, were rich. They started with one cart, then bought another, then another, and eventually they enslaved other immigrants. Maybe this couple was rich, Harry thought. This was their cautious public life, designed to throw off the tax people, to deflect envy and discourage thieves.
    The woman quickly made sharp diagonal cuts along the sausage, then flipped it onto the grill. She worried it and prodded it in fluid movements, then finally picked it up with the tongs and placed it in a bun. Harry smothered it with hot peppers and added a dab of mustard, then took his sausage and sat on a cement planter and watched the traffic go by.
    He was just finishing his lunch when a man came by and asked him for change. “Can’t help you, brother,” Harry said in what he meant to be a tone of solidarity.
    The man stalked half a dozen steps, then returned. “Buy me a hot dog, asshole,” he said. He was maybe Harry’s age, his swollen face the colour of a rugby ball, with a full head of longish black hair. His raincoat was greasy, and beneath it Harry glimpsed layers of discarded fashions: a green sweater, a grey shirt, a black T-shirt with gothic lettering. His dirty white loafers, the shoes of a racetrack tout, looked to be two sizes too big.
    “What?”
    “Buy me a fucking hot dog, you Ralph Lauren dick.”
    Harry stared at him.
    “You don’t,” the man said, pointing to the cart, “I’ll put my hand in that mustard and smear it all over your jacket. I’ll piss on your shoes.”
    Adrenaline hummed. Harry reached into his pants and came out with a $2 coin. “Knock yourself out,” he said, flipping it toward the man, as if for a coin toss. The man made no attempt to catch it. It landed on the concrete, rolled briefly and stopped.
    “You buy it,” the man said. He was leaning slightly, coiled.
    “Fuck you,” Harry said sharply, and stood up, fearful of a sucker punch. They both waited in that small, charged vacuum that precedes violence, then the man bent over, picked up the coin and walked over to the cart. He bought a hot dog and Harry watched as he piled an absurd amount of mustard and relish onto it.
    As the man walked back toward him, he took a huge bite of the hot dog and started talking before he had swallowed it all. “You worried I’m going to give you that speech, the one where none of you assholes even see guys like me. We’re invisible.” Small bits of wet bun spilled out of his mouth and lingered in his beard. “That horseshit speech.”
    Everyone was invisible, Harry thought. He was invisible.
    The man pushed the second half of the hot dog into his mouth. He made as if to shake Harry’s hand, then wiped both his grimy, stained hands on the lapels of Harry’s sports jacket, the Calvin Klein he’d bought on sale.
    “Racquetball on Monday, Bud,” the man said. “We still on?”
    Parts of
Read Online Free Pdf

Similar Books

Learning

Karen Kingsbury

Craving Flight

Tamsen Parker

Tempo Change

Barbara Hall

This Old Souse

Mary Daheim

Rain Music

Di Morrissey

Waking Kiss

Annabel Joseph