Read Online How Loveta Got Her Baby by Nicholas Ruddock - Free Book Online Page A

feel good about that,” said Henry.
    Aaron didn’t spend a penny of his inheritance in St. John’s. He came right back last night just as the fog came rolling in as thick as eiderdown, but damned if he didn’t decide right then and there to walk one mile out of town. He was headed for Ed’s Convenience Store, a sort of Shangri-La for Aaron Stoodley. The store had been for sale non-stop for seven years, and no way could he go by it without a turn of melancholy. He wanted to buy it. He wanted to buy it despite the fact that ten or maybe twenty cars a day went by. Once he tried to buy it on credit, on a promise.
    â€œNo money no way,” is what Ed said to him, “you already owes me twenty dollars on red licorice. Some fool am I.”
    So now, when suddenly he had the funds, Aaron walked into the fog. A chill set in and he turned up his collar, pulled out his gloves, put them on, slapped his palms together in one of those surges of happiness and stepped out into the night. It was not until he’d gone twenty steps that he tapped his coat pocket, tapped it to feel the reassuring great chunk of money that was his. It was gone. The road-bed slanted hard into the ditch, the grass was thick, matted, invisible. For hours then, he crawled every inch of the path he’d taken, on his hands and knees, and he rolled gravel under his fingertips, raked through freezing puddles until pain and numbness were his constant companions and he cursed his own foolishness.
    Then, as they all knew, Henry and the girls ran him over.
    â€œI’d give a thousand dollars, Henry, to find it.”
    Wishful thinking, Henry thought, but understandable. Anything could disappear out there in the wilds and never be seen again.
    Then Queenie reached into her purse and she pulled out a roll of paper money as big as her hand, maybe bigger, a big bank elastic on it tighter than a miser.
    â€œJeez Queenie, Jeez Queenie, Jeez Queenie, what the heck,” was all Henry and Aaron said.
    They sounded like two accordions tuning up.
    Aaron was as good as his word, he gave the reward money to Queenie right there. He smacked his lips, peeled off a thousand dollars from the money roll and handed it back to her.
    That’s how Eunice and Henry and Queenie got their nest egg for the tar sands. They put it in the bank. That’s how Aaron Stoodley went out and made an offer on the convenience store.
    That’s how Eunice and Henry ended up owing their little girl, Pasquena, known as Queenie, one thousand dollars. They borrowed it from her.
    â€œWe’ll pay you back when you’re sixteen, or twenty-one,” they said.
    â€œLucky we bought that purse,” Henry said to Eunice later, when they were in bed, “instead of that cheap little locket.”
    She knew what he meant. At K-Mart, Eunice had wanted to buy the locket. Henry liked the purse. Queenie didn’t care one way or the other but what did Henry know about girls, about presents? Anyway, they did buy the little purse.
    â€œSee, Eunice, I’m trying to figure out how Queenie could have jammed all that money of Aaron’s into that little locket you wanted to buy.”
    They were curled up close together, Henry behind her.
    â€œThe one with the clasp, the little clasp that looked like it would break right off? Eunice?”
    There was no answer. She was asleep.
    Fact is, if they’d gone and bought the locket, they’d have been just as happy. They might have had a different story to tell though, and a little less money in the long run. And Aaron Stoodley wouldn’t really have cared either. He’d gotten run over and lived to tell about it. How much greater than money was that?

tele -       
scope
    FOR AT LEAST three months now, Hilda Cluett had stood to one side of her kitchen window and watched the teacher, Albert May, eat his dinner, either outside on the school steps when the weather was fine or, when it