Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

but after a moment’s hesitation—to Craine’s mild astonishment—she looked left and right, head thrown forward myopically, checking for traffic, then came hurrying across the street and, watching him to see that he didn’t run over her, edged around the front of the truck. He leaned over, reaching past the whiskey, and pushed open the door. She poked her head in, wide-eyed. Her mouth was large and full and as plain as a bagel.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said—speaking in a burst above the restaurant noise, shoveling her egg in, chewing with her mouth open, sometimes jerking back from her plate, stopping suddenly, eyebrows jerking upward, eyes slightly bulging, her long hand poking at her breakfast with her fork as if she thought for a moment she’d discovered a hair in it—possibly a spider—but finding nothing and popping the bite into her mouth, chewing again very carefully with her mouth open, eyes cast over toward the corner of the restaurant as if analyzing the texture of the egg for the hair she’d missed. “Boy! You don’t know! They come driving from Chicago—my parents never fly—my mother loves flying but my father’s scared shitless, so everywhere they go they take the car or the train. So they come driving from Chicago and we all go to the Gardens, it’s the only restaurant in Gourmet magazine—they do everything in style, if you know what I mean, and they tell you about it—you know what I mean?”

Craine nodded, carefully spreading jelly on his toast. The restaurant was crowded—students, telephone men, bakery-truck drivers with yellow writing on their coats. Craine had to lean in to hear. The brick and glass walls sent back a primal roar, the deep pythonic rumble of silverware and talk, and in the kitchen and at the pass-through, plates slammed, bacon hissed, busboys and waitresses cried out sharply to the two black cooks.

“It makes me naushus when we eat in fancy restaurants,” Elaine said. “When I was little I used to throw up. Sometimes I still do. You know what I mean?”

“It’s all right,” Craine said, trying to calm her.

“All right? Are you crazy?”

At first he misheard her in all the noise, but then he got it. “I mean you don’t need to be nervous. It’s all right.” He had his whiskey in the booth seat beside him. He’d decided it was better not to leave it in the truck. He resisted the temptation now to pour himself a shot, concentrating instead on finishing off his toast. He was not a big breakfast man. Even the toast went down heavy as remorse.

Tentatively the girl poked hashbrowns into her mouth. “So we sit there with these fountains all around us, the place is practically dark, and these waiters in black standing over us like buzzards, listening to every word we say but not showing it, faces just like wax, you know?—and every time my mother gets a cigarette out, or my father—they both smoke like maniacs, trying to kill themselves, it’s the truth, they really are—there’s the waiter’s silver lighter.”

Fork upside down, she trapped the last of the hashbrowns and raised them to her mouth. Her eyes were large now, and not only because of the magnification of her lenses.

“ ‘Elaine, we just don’t understand,’ my mother says. As if right from the beginning it was all in my head. It was their idea I should hire a detective. ‘We’re not so poor we can’t afford a little safety,’ says my mother. ‘To your father and I there is nothing in this world more important than your welfare.’ She calls up Uncle Phil, he’s not really my uncle, he’s a lawyer, she thinks he knows everything. He’s a member of my father’s camera club and sometimes he and his wife and my mother and father play bridge. He asks around, these people he knows there, detectives or something, and he tells my mother, ‘There’s a man down in Carbondale named Gerald Craine. I’m told he’s the best.’ I was suspicious right away. I mean, people talk, and you’re sort of a local character, you know what I mean? But what am I supposed to do? Who am I gonna ask? You don’t know how hard it is for a person to make friends in a place like this. The people in my classes, well—I’m Jewish, for one thing. It gives you an unfair intellectual advantage, and they hate you, it’s a well-known fact. They hardly even look at you, the kids in my classes, and if you raise your hand and answer a question they look disgusted. I do it anyway, because you have to get an education or you’re a victim all your life, especially if you’re a woman.” She looked down, frowning as if she’d glimpsed the image leaping up in Craine’s mind, not that she possibly could, he supposed—an image of Elaine Glass sullenly leaving the classroom, notebook and textbooks clamped to her chest, head thrown forward, chin lifted, eyes lowered, avoiding whatever looks her classmates gave her, whether mocking, friendly, or utterly oblivious, poor sad alien child darkly wrapped to the eyes in defensive righteousness. She wrung her hands. “I forgot what I was saying,” she said.

He closed his fingers around the bottle but again changed his mind. “You were suspicious when your family’s friend suggested me,” he prompted. He tried to catch their waitress’s eye to ask for coffee. She saw him but coolly looked away.

Elaine Glass nodded, less embarrassed now. “Right. That’s right. So I went and got the cashier’s check—” She glanced up at him. “It’s not true that I spied on your agency for weeks, but it is true that after I’d mailed you the check—”

Craine smiled, touched by her earnestness. “I know. It’s all right. Go on.”

She nodded her head up and down like an eager student, running her fork around and around the plate though there was nothing left but grease and maybe two bits of egg the size of