The Scarlet Letter Society Read Online Free PDF Page B

the store at any time.
    Ten minutes later, Stanley and Zarina were sitting on the couch next to each other, playing Words with Friends together on their phones.
    Stanley looked at Zarina.
    “Thanks for being my old person,” he said, and gave that silly, crooked grin that simply undid her.
    When Stanley came into her shop for coffee one day, they just sort of clicked: finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at stupid things no one else would think were funny. Stanley joked that they were kind of like… old people who would play on a Scrabble board in their retirement community in the same way they played WWF on iPhones. It’s the same game, seriously , he’d said.
    “I love being old people with you,” she said.
    Love is awesome , thought Zarina. Except when it sucks . She listened to the ladies at the SLS club each month, and they talk about doomed love and who’s having sex with whom. I mean Jesus Christ , she’d tell Stanley, these bitches are horny!
    “Maybe they’re in some kind of full blown mid-life crisis,” Stanley had said, “but man, they do seem to be gettin’ it on.”
    Zarina believed, despite it sounding “all hippy-dippy” as her mom would say… she believed love is the thing, not sex. It was about the personal relationship ; the intimacy of spirits, not bodies. You can have sex with anybody. Love only happens with someone really, really special.
    She put down the Words With Friends game she was currently winning and brewed some coffee. It made the world go round, and all.

    Her day’s first customer checked out and left, and the sound of the door clicking behind her threw Maggie into a trance.
    The dreaded sound: a soft click of the front door locked behind her mother as she left. 9-1-1 was written in huge letters next to the phone. Maggie always pretended to be asleep so her mother wouldn’t worry she’d been awake and frightened. Maggie would watch the minutes tick by on the old-fashioned alarm clock, and sometimes it would be 2:35 or 3:07. And then one day, her mother packed Maggie’s things into two brown paper grocery store bags and brought her to the home of a foster family. She told her she loved her, that she didn’t want her to feel cold or be in the dark anymore, and then she was gone. Maggie was six. She never saw her mother again .
    The gentle tinkling of the small bell that hung from the handle of the 1884 original door to her Victorian commercial building once again served as an alarm to Maggie’s daymare. She grabbed a pill from her purse and chased it with a sip of her coffee. Putting down her copy of The Scarlet Letter , she saw Ted as he entered the shop. He was holding a handful of peonies. When she saw the flowers, she knew two things: that they’d come from the huge light pink bush near his building across town, and that he’d already taken them inside to wash off all the ants that perpetually plagued the sweet-smelling blooms.
    “Good morning, beautiful lady,” he said, dramatically presenting the handful of freshly cut (and only slightly drippy) blooms to her.
    Maggie smiled like a schoolgirl. She loved the way he always said “good morning” to her, even if it wasn’t morning. She thanked him, took the flowers and put them in a big, old turquoise Ball jar on the counter.
    “Thank you for that ant removal service, dahlin,” she said, and Ted grinned at her pronunciation: her New England accent had always been sexy to him. “It was nice of you to remember I love peonies, but hate ants.”
    When she finished with the flowers, she walked around the counter and put her arms around his neck. He returned her kiss eagerly with a soft, exploratory prodof the tongue followed by a gentle grazing of her upper lip with his teeth. She slapped him playfully on the butt of his worn, faded jeans.
    “You know, I’m open for business around here, mistah, and it’s not that kind of business.”
    “I’d like to have you open for business right now upstairs,