Read Online Annie by Thomas Meehan - Free Book Online Page A

tomorrow,” said Annie quietly. “Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun.” Sandy’s large brown eyes seemed suddenly to become more trusting, and he licked her face with his big red tongue. She smiled. He likes me, Annie happily realized, as much as I like him. It began to rain harder. Annie shook her head, gazed at the sky, and said wryly to herself, “I love you, tomorrow, ’cause you’re always a day away.”
    â€œCome on, Sandy,” urged Annie, “we gotta find ourselves someplace to stay tonight, in out of this darn rain, and we gotta find some way to get ourselves somethin’ to eat.” Staying close to the buildings so as not to get drenched in the rain, the small girl and her outsize dog hurried eastward along the wet New York sidewalks. They looked up in awe as they passed through a part of the city that, Annie later found out, was called Times Square—it was a dazzle of movie theaters and enormous, brightly colored neon signs that flashed on and off in the dark, rainy afternoon. No one seemed even to notice Annie and Sandy in the crowds of people hurrying in all directions. Before long, they came upon a large, gray granite building—it was Grand Central Terminal. “Good, we can get in out of the rain here,” Annie told Sandy, and she led him through a doorway and down a flight of marble stairs to the main concourse of the station, the biggest room that Annie had ever seen. “Wow, Sandy, look at this place. How’d you like to live here?” said Annie, her eyes bright with wonder at the huge hall and its ceiling of painted stars. For a time, happy to be in out of the rain, Annie and Sandy wandered about the station, jostled by the crowds hustling to and from trains. “Someday, I’ll find my father and mother and they’ll take us on a train trip, maybe to the seashore or the mountains,” Annie promised Sandy.
    As the rainy afternoon passed into evening, Annie felt herself growing hungrier and hungrier. And she suspected that Sandy was hungry, too. “We gotta find ourselves some way to make some money, so’s we can buy somethin’ to eat,” explained Annie to Sandy, and then she spied an apple seller standing by the Lexington Avenue entrance with a tray of apples strung about his neck. “Apples, apples, two for ten! Get your nice rosy-red apples!” the man cried over and over again, but no one stopped to buy apples from him. He was a haggard, unshaven man in a threadbare brown suit that must have seen better days before the Depression, but he had friendly eyes, and Annie decided to take a chance on speaking to him. “Excuse me, mister,” she said, “but where do you get the apples to sell?”
    â€œThinking of going into business, little lady?” asked the man cheerfully.
    â€œWell, I don’t know. Maybe.”
    â€œI get them at a wholesale fruit market over by the East River,” the man told her. “They sell for a penny apiece, a hundred for a dollar, and I sell them for a nickel apiece, thus making a handsome profit of four cents per apple. That, my little lady, is what we Americans call capitalism. Buy low and sell high. A few years ago, I was doing it with stocks and bonds, and now I’m in the retail apple game. But I can’t complain. You sell yourself a thousand apples a day and you make yourself forty dollars.”
    â€œWow!” Annie exclaimed. “How many have you sold today?”
    â€œThree,” said the man with a rueful laugh, “for a net profit of twelve cents. But things are looking up. Yesterday I only sold two.”
    â€œOh,” said Annie. She tried to sound enthusiastic.
    â€œTell me, little lady,” asked the apple seller, “are you hungry?”
    â€œWell, I . . .”
    â€œOf course you are. Everybody is.” And he handed her a pair of apples. “Here you go, my dear,” he said