Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street Read Online Free PDF

“bless you, angel,” which bothered me, or just “thanks” or “
gracias,
” which were fine, or nothing at all, which was what I preferred, hard to say why. My favorite customer—that was what we were supposed to call them—was this old guy called Little Zane. He wasn’t little at all, but kind of huge, and always had a harmonica in his pocket, which he sometimes played after he’d finished eating. Little Zane was amazing on the harmonica; the word was that he’d played in the Village with Bob Dylan when Dylan was just starting out, but if he had, he never talked about it. He mostly just said the titles of the songs after he played, like “Black Snake Moan” or “You Got to Move.”
    “Big crowd today,” Mom said, and as we got closer, we saw they weren’t lined up but were sort of millingaround. We moved through them to the front door. Bread was in a storefront in an old brick building and had big windows, which made it easy to see that it was dark and empty inside.
    A sign was pasted on the door. “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?” The sign read SORRY—CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. “Mom?”
    My mom squeezed in beside me—Pendleton whimpering, maybe because of all the people—and checked the sign. “I have no idea,” she said.
    Somewhere in the crowd a woman yelled, “Nothing changes, brothers and sisters, nothing changes.” After that came a short period of muttering and shuffling around and then all the customers sort of melted away. I spotted Little Zane headed toward the subway entrance, his head down. And wait! Who was that, just behind him, a jacketless kid with dreads, wearing just a long-sleeve tee? Tut-Tut? Sure looked like him. Had Tut-Tut been in the crowd at Bread? Was he hungry? He disappeared from view, either down into the subway or around the corner.
    Mom and I stood by the door, Pendleton panting beside us. I put my face to the glass. Way in the dimness at the back, I saw movement.
    “Someone’s in there,” I said.
    Mom gazed peered through the window. “It’s Claire.”
    Claire was a nun—but one of those nuns who didn’t wear the nun costume, so she didn’t seem scary—and also she was the main person in charge of Bread. Mom rapped on the glass. Claire emerged from the shadows, glanced up and down the street, then opened the door.
    “Hello, Jane,” she said. “Hi, Robbie.” Her eyes had dark patches under them, and her face looked ashy. “Sorry you came for nothing,” she said. “There was just no time to notify everybody, and right up until this morning, I thought we’d work something out.”
    “I don’t understand,” my mom said. “What’s going on?”
    “There’s a new landlord,” Claire said. “Some developer, apparently. He wants us out.”
    “He can’t just do that,” my mom said. “There’s a whole process—it can take a year or more.”
    “But he can raise the rent,” Claire said. “In fact, he doubled it. And with the funding cuts, there’s no way. He slapped a lien on us yesterday and somehow cut off all our suppliers.”
    “How did he do that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What’s the new rent?”
    “Eight thousand a month.”
    “My God,” my mom said. That was the only part of the conversation I actually grasped: eight thousand dollars.
    “And our cash on hand at the moment is fifty-three hundred,” Claire said. She produced a clipboard. “We’re gathering a petition to send to the developer—with copies to City Hall and the governor’s office.”
    “We’ll sign,” said Mom.
    Claire handed me the clipboard. There were signatures almost to the bottom of the top page. I signed my name—R. M. Forester, which was how I’d been signing my name lately, the
M
standing for Matilda, a total blunder of a choice on my parents’ part—and handed the clipboard to my mom.
    She read the writing at the top of the page, what the petition actually said, I supposed, a step I’d skipped. All of a sudden, she paused and her