Twenty-Six Read Online Free PDF Page A

icily in the black winter overcast. Ennis crossed the parking lot, went in, and stamped his feet on the grate inside the door.
    “Too late for the lotto, Ennis,” the girl behind the register called. It was a Sewell girl, one of Linda Sewell’s daughters. Her name wouldn’t be Sewell, though. Who was it her mother had married?
    “It’s never too late for that,” Ennis said. “I can always buy for the next draw.” The girl laughed and walked over to where the lottery machine was set up. She had her mother’s square, honest smile and compact but shapely build. Ennis caught himself looking at her breasts, then turned quickly away before he could see if she’d noticed. He’d dated Linda Sewell several times in the late forties, right after the war. They’d been kids, really. Linda had probably been younger then than her daughter was now.
    He walked to the pop cooler and stood swaying slightly before it. He put a hand to the door of the cooler to brace himself, then squeezed his eyes shut. He was trying to get rid of a picture that had arisen in his mind: Linda Sewell in the back seat of his ’38 Ford. He shook his head vigorously, like a dog trying to kill the prey clenched in its teeth.
    “You okay, Ennis?” the girl called from over his shoulder.
    “Aw, I’ve been having a drink, is all. The heat hit me, coming in the door, there.”
    He went back to the counter with a 500 ml Pepsi. “Wet my whistle,” he said. The girl was still poised over the lotto machine. She had a fresh, pepperminty smell that penetrated Ennis’s drunkenness and had him breathing deeply through his nose.
    “Just the Pepsi,” Ennis said. He looked up and locked his gaze on the girl’s eyes, afraid that if he let his gaze wander somewhere else, it would go where he didn’t want it to.
    “Down to the Tartan, were you?” the girl asked, moving in behind the register. With a different hairstyle, she could have been her mother. She had broad, flat cheekbones and a tiny, stone-chiselled nose whose nostrils scooped up and back in a way that suggested permanent arousal. Her eyes were … Ennis could no longer bear to look at her. He bowed his head over the counter and focused on the money he was handing over, and on the scratch tickets beneath the glassed-in case on the countertop.
    “You’re going home early,” the girl remarked.
    “There’s some real arseholes down there tonight,” Ennis said. He frowned at the memory of what had happened in the tavern, then looked up into the girl’s eyes again. “You’re Linda Sewell’s girl, aren’t you?” he said.
    The girl looked surprised, then said. “I … guess so. Her name’s MacKenzie now. Seems funny to hear that name … Linda Sewell.”
    “How’s your mother these days?” Ennis asked.
    The girl looked alarmed and began to stutter a reply.
    Ennis stopped her. “I have no right to be talking to you this way,” he said. “I’ve made a mistake. I told you, I’ve been having a drink.” He plucked the Pepsi from the counter, pushed it down into a pocket of his coat, and rushed out through the door.
    When he reached his own house, Ennis stood at the end of the driveway a moment and thought about how much the place had changed. He and Dunya, his wife, had moved in years before, justa few weeks before Arvel had been born. The house had barely been worked on since it had been built. So although the house was old, and no one would ever mistake its uneven floors and chipped and repainted door casings for new, almost everything in the house had been replaced since they’d lived here. Ennis had reroofed it the first summer. The next year he’d got together with Ab Arnold, who owned the other side of the coal company duplex, and covered the original clapboard with smart cedar shingles. The floors had been tiled, retiled, and carpeted. Pressboard ceiling tiles had covered up the original plaster ceilings. The walls were covered in the simulated wood panelling that had been