The Stand (Original Edition) Read Online Free PDF

bitch, he thought. She didn’t even hang up my duds.
    “Lila!” he bawled.
    There was no answer. He considered ripping the door open again and asking Luke where the hell she had gone. It wasn’t donated commodities day until next week and if she was down at the employment office in Braintree again, she was an even bigger fool than he thought.
    He didn’t bother to ask the kids. He felt tired, and he had a queasy, thumping headache. Felt like a hangover, but he’d only had three beers down at Hap’s the night before. That accident had been a hell of a thing. The woman and the baby dead in the car, the man, Campion, dying on the way to the hospital. By the time Hap had gotten back, the State Patrol had come and gone, and the wrecker, and the Braintree undertaker’s hack. Vic Palfrey had given the State Patrols a statement for all five of them. The undertaker, who was also the county coroner, refused to speculate on what might have hit them.
    “But it ain’t cholera. And don’t you go scarin people sayin it is. There’ll be an autopsy and you can read about it in the paper.”
    Miserable little pissant, Norm thought, slowly dressing himself in yesterday’s clothes. His headache was turning into a real blinder. Those kids had better be quiet or they were going to have a pair of broken arms to mouth off about. Why the hell couldn’t they have school the whole year round?
    He considered tucking his shirt into his pants, decided the president probably wouldn’t    be stopping by that day, and shuffled out into the kitchen in his sock feet. The bright sunlight coming in the east windows made him squint.
    The cracked Philco radio over the stove sang:
    “But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can ,
    Baby, can you dig your man?
    He’s a righteous man,
    Tell me baby, can you dig your man?"
    Things had come to a pretty pass when they had to play nigger rock n roll music like that on the local country music station. Norm turned it off before it could split his head. There was a note by the radio and he picked it up, squinting his eyes to read it.
    "Dear Norm, Sally Hodges says she needs somebody to sit her kids this morning and says shell give me a dolar. Ill be back for luntch. Theres sassage if you want it. I love you honey. Lila."
    Norm put the note back and just stood there for a moment, thinking it over and trying to get the sense of it in his mind. It was goddam hard to think past the headache. Babysitting ... a dollar. For Ralph Hodges’s wife.
    The three elements slowly jelled together in his mind. Lila had gone off to sit Sally Hodges’s three kids to earn a lousy dollar and had stuck him with Luke and Bobby. By God it was hard times when a man had to sit home and wipe his kids’ noses so his wife could go and scratch out a lousy buck that would give them back pocket change from a gallon of gas. That was hard fucking times.
    Dull anger came to him, making his head ache even worse. He shuffled slowly to the Frigidaire, bought when he had been making good overtime, and opened it. Most of the shelves were empty, except for leftovers Lila had put up in refrigerator dishes. He hated those little plastic Tupperware dishes. Old beans, old corn, a leftover dab of chile . . . nothing a man liked to eat. Nothing in there but little Tupperware dishes and three little old sausages done up in Handy Wrap. He bent, looking in at them, the familiar helpless anger now compounded by the dull throb in his head. He didn’t feel like eating anyway. He felt damn sick, when you got right down to it.
    He went over to the stove, scratched a match on the piece of sandpaper nailed to the wall beside it, lit the front gas ring, and put on the coffee. Then he sat down and waited dully for it to boil. Just before it did, he had to scramble his snotrag out of his back pocket to catch a big wet sneeze. Coming down with a cold, he thought. Isn’t that something nice on top of everything else? But it never occurred to him to think of