The Unfortunates Read Online Free PDF Page B

men on the stools—newer and cleaner and tucked together with a distinguished necessity.
    The light of the kid’s shot wove under the curve of his cap. “Blow it out, dummy,” she said.
    Later, he slid from one empty barstool to the next until he was sitting across from her, bleary-eyed. “Doctor,” he said. “Howmmmmidoin?”
    Why not? He was pretty—sandy hair needing a cut, wide, heavy eyes, locker shoulders and a field tan, a lopsided frown she figured to be his main move, not bad. Had he connected her to her band, the one CD they’d released being titled Doctor Edible ? No. Ancient history. He’d probably never even owned a CD. Soon she no longer drove down the hill at the end of her shift. They woke in his room and crossed the campus to the coffee kiosk. He had the rolling walk young men have, which she noticed when she walked behind him so they would not be discovered.
    By the end of the semester, she’d kept him company through most of his intro classes, the big ones where she wouldn’t be noticed in the darkened lecture halls with seats deeper than at the movies, with the slides and the distant professor at the podium, who in Art History 101 shouted, “Putto!” waving his red laser over each winged, chubby menace perching on a cloud. There was Art History and American Literature: Civil War–Present, and Introduction to Western Philosophy One: Aristotle–Hegel. Listening in the dark, a complicated dream. Afterward, she’d forget to be careful and they’d walk the quad side by side. (That they had to be careful she’d at first thought was a game or a joke, and later became a point of disagreement.) She’d talk about what they heard and he’d say, “That’s an opinion. You’re smart. If you could come to conference they’d jump all over it.” She read the books he was assigned—not all of them, and not all the way through, but she read over the parts the professors discussed until she thought she might understand them. An unfamiliar kind of hunger, most satisfied when it wasn’t satisfied at all. The kid stopped going to lecture. Twice she went alone, but she felt like a burglar entering the dark auditorium without him. She tried to imagine what she was missing—the paintings projected on the wall, the way one idea lit up another.
    When summer came, he gave her his campus ID so she could use the library. She took a second job at a golf club, to make up for the falloff in bar tips with the students gone, and to save money for the trip they planned to go on when he returned—all over Europe, sharing a backpack. He’d show her the cathedrals. I promise, he’d said, touching his cap. At the library, they looked at the photo and would not let her in. At the Athletic Center, they didn’t care. Each day, before heading to the golf club, she swam in the Olympic-size pool and walked the garden behind the School of Agriculture’s Plant Science Building, her hair wet, her skin tight from the chlorine. She read the names on the markers stuck in the long neat rows of flowers and herbs, sounding out the Latin, memorizing the English. A library without a door. She didn’t consider signing up for classes on her own. She called her mother, whom she was not friends with but who did have a certain way with the truth. Her mother, by then in assisted living in Oswego with her sister-in-law, four plaid rooms that faced away from Lake Ontario, but her voice still resonant as a goose, Quebecois and Jersey. “Young man’s coming back, not to you.” And, “You, school?” At the golf club, jackets were required in the dining room. George was the guy with the intense face who couldn’t find his ticket.
    “All done,” the father calls.
    Back in the driveway, Iris balances her blue checkbook against the trunk of a fir. She writes TruClear Pool in block letters, having never learned script. She writes 00/100 . And how unnatural the rip of the check off the book always sounds out of doors!
    They turn away but