Mr. Tall Read Online Free PDF Page B

of coffee, but he was in the clear for now.
    â€œHey,” he said.
    She yawned, and he heard her sit up in bed. “Where are you?”
    â€œI’m not sure. I fell into the ocean.”
    â€œAre you all right?”
    â€œI wish we had our newspaper back,” he said.
    â€œI know you do.”
    â€œI wish we had our newspaper back and I wish you were pasting up the front page and I wish we had a good picture above the fold and I wish Misti was under the light table.”
    â€œWe can’t do anything about any of that,” she said softly. “That’s all gone, baby.”
    â€œThen what are we going to do, Cheryl? Please tell me, because I honestly don’t know.”
    Cheryl drew in a deep breath, held it a beat, then let it out. He pictured her with her eyes closed, holding a fistful of her hair straight up in the air. When she opened her eyes and let go of her hair, she would be ready to face whatever needed to be faced. He had been married to her for more years than he had been alive before he met her. It was a fearsome mathematics to consider, a number unrolling day by day toward some finite but unfathomable edition. They had gone to print together 4,864 times. They had spent their youths compiling a record already sliding from the realm of the public into the realm of the historical inside a morgue of microfiche drawers in the Argyle library. Their daughter was going away from them in exactly the expected ways. Darryl held himself perfectly still.
    â€œOkay, College Boy,” she said finally, “here’s what we’re going to do. In the morning, we’re going to eat a big breakfast. Then we’re going to go to Virginia Beach and find us an interstate pointed toward home. After that we’ll just have to see. Does that sound good, Darryl? Because right now that’s all I’ve got.”
    In all the years he had worked with her, Cheryl had never worried about the next paper until it was time to lay it out, and she had never met a deadline she was afraid of. For his part, whenever she yelled, “College Boy, get your worthless ass back here and bring me some copy!” he had always produced, even on the deadest days, copy enough to bring her. It was the only way he knew to make a life, the transfigurative ordering of event into story, something he could not do without Cheryl. What good, after all, is editorial without production? He stood up and turned in the darkness toward where he remembered the door to be.
    â€œThat sounds good enough,” he said. “Let’s run it.”

 
    O N THE FIRST SATURDAY in January 1932, when she was sixteen years old, Plutina Scroggs married Charlie Shires in her father’s house beside the railroad track in Weald, North Carolina. That morning she bathed her mother and wrestled her into a white nightgown trimmed with lace bought specially for the occasion. (A stroke had rendered Mrs. Scroggs mute, bedridden, and, so far as anyone could tell, senseless as a pillow when Plutina was eleven years old.) Both her older sister Henrietta and her father believed Plutina to be betraying them—not necessarily for marrying Charlie Shires but for moving away from Weald, leaving them shorthanded with an invalid to care for—and quietly but pointedly made their displeasure known. Her father refused to speak to Charlie that morning and despite the bitter weather sat alone on the front porch without a coat until the preacher called him in for the ceremony. At the last minute Henrietta decided that their mother couldn’t be left alone for the fifteen minutes it would take Charlie and Plutina to say their vows and eat a piece of cake and chose instead to sit at Mrs. Scroggs’s bedside, melodramatically stroking her hand.
    Before Plutina left she went into her parents’ bedroom and kissed her mother, but not Henrietta, good-bye. Henrietta’s unforgivably bad manners on what Plutina insisted was the