The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

found a frame building with a few cars parked in front of it. A dusty neon sign glowed in the window: NELL ’ S GROCERY & CAFE . Ira parkednext to a Jeep with a Judas Priest sticker on the bumper. Maggie opened her door and stepped out, surreptitiously hitching up the crotch of her panty hose.
    The grocery smelled of store bread and waxed paper. It reminded her of a grade-school lunchroom. Here and there women stood gazing at canned goods. The café lay at the rear—one long counter, with faded color photos of orange scrambled eggs and beige link sausages lining the wall behind it. Maggie and Ira settled on adjacent stools and Ira flattened his map on the counter. Maggie watched the waitress cleaning a griddle. She sprayed it with something, scraped up thick gunk with a spatula, and sprayed again. From behind she was a large white rectangle, her gray bun tacked down with black bobby pins. “What you going to order?” she asked finally, not turning around.
    Ira said, “Just coffee for me, please,” without looking up from his map. Maggie had more trouble deciding. She took off her sunglasses and peered at the color photos. “Well, coffee too, I guess,” she said, “and also, let me think, I ought to have a salad or something, but—”
    “We don’t serve any salads,” the waitress said. She set aside her spray bottle and came over to Maggie, wiping her hands on her apron. Her eyes, netted with wrinkles, were an eerie light green, like old beach glass. “The onliest thing I could offer is the lettuce and tomato from a sandwich.”
    “Well, maybe just a sack of those taco chips from the rack, then,” Maggie said happily. “Though I know I shouldn’t.” She watched the waitress pour two mugs of coffee. “I’m trying to lose ten pounds by Thanksgiving. I’ve been working on the same ten pounds forever, but this time I’m determined.”
    “Shoot!
You
don’t need to lose weight,” the woman said, setting the mugs in front of them. The red stitchingacross her breast pocket read
Mabel
, a name Maggie had not heard since her childhood. What had become of all the Mabels? She tried to picture giving a new little baby that name. Meanwhile the woman was telling her, “I despise how everybody tries to look like a toothpick nowadays.”
    “That’s what Ira says; he likes me the weight I am now,” Maggie said. She glanced over at Ira but he was deep in his map, or else just pretending to be. It always embarrassed him when she took up with outsiders. “But then anytime I go to buy a dress it hangs wrong, you know? Like they don’t expect me to have a bustline. I lack willpower is the problem. I crave salty things. Pickly things. Hot spices.” She accepted the sack of taco chips and held it up, demonstrating.
    “How about me?” Mabel asked. “Doctor says I’m so overweight my legs are going.”
    “Oh, you are not! Show me where you’re overweight!”
    “He says it wouldn’t be so bad if I was in some other job but waitressing; it gets to my veins.”
    “Our daughter’s been working as a waitress,” Maggie said. She tore open the sack of taco chips and bit into one. “Sometimes she’s on her feet for eight hours straight without a break. She started out in sandals but switched to crepe soles soon enough, I can tell you, even though she swore she wouldn’t.”
    “You are surely not old enough to have a daughter that grown up,” Mabel said.
    “Oh, she’s still a teenager; this was just a summer job. Tomorrow she leaves for college.”
    “College! A smarty,” Mabel said.
    “Oh, well,
I
don’t know,” Maggie said. “She did get a full scholarship, though.” She held out the sack. “You want some?”
    Mabel took a handful. “Mine are all boys,” she toldMaggie. “Studying came about as natural to them as flying.”
    “Yes, our boy was that way.”
    “ ‘Why aren’t you doing your homework?’ I’d ask them. They’d have a dozen excuses. Most often they claimed the teacher didn’t