Read Online Light from a Distant Star by Mary Mcgarry Morris - Free Book Online

Max, this is Miss Dolly Bedelia. Ms., I mean,” she added, hoping Dolly wasn’t offended. She realized she didn’t know Max’s last name and he didn’t offer it.
    “Hi,” was all Dolly said, which even Nellie knew was inadequate.
    He gave a stiff nod back.
    “I gotta go eat fast,” she said on her wiggly way to the door. “Or I’ll be late for work. Nice meeting ya!” She waved back with a breezy flap of the bread that sprayed crumbs onto the floor.
    “An’ you,” Max grunted as the door banged shut.
    Nellie continued what she’d been saying before, that her mother said to tell Charlie his pajamas weren’t in the bag.
    “Where’s she work?” he interrupted.
    “Frederic’s. But she doesn’t have them there. They’re not worth mending, she said. She’s just gonna get him some new ones.”
    “I mean …” He nodded at the door.
    “Oh. Up on Route nine. The Paradise. Yeah, Dolly. She’s a dancer. And a singer, too. A really good one.” Nellie was enjoying her moment of authority. “She used to be in New York. You know, like, Broadway or something.”
    “Hey, mister!”
    With the burst of Dolly’s voice through the screen, they both glanced back.
    “Your friggin’ dog—he’s on my porch and I can’t get in.”
    “He was in the truck,” Max said.
    “Yeah, till he jumped out the window.”
    Muttering, Max hurried outside and pulled Boone by the collar into the truck. A moment later he returned for the mending. First time Boone’d ever done that, he said, seeming oddly flustered as he lingered in the doorway. He most always left the window open and Boone just knew to stay put. Every time. Maybe it was the bread, Nellie suggested, not wanting him to be too disappointed. Or angry. She still remembered his attack on that other dog. Probably smelled it and just wanted some. Here, she said, starting to open the bread bag, but Max shook his head; that’s no kind of lesson, he said, rewarding him for doing the wrong thing. Maybe he just saw a squirrel or something, she said, and he just forgot for a second, that’s all. With animals, it’s all about instinct. One going after the other. She was on a roll, and best of all was having an adult listen to what she had to say. Like that time in the junkyard, she continued without pause for breath, the pit bull, remember? And the way Boone charged right at him. That was different, Max said. He’d acted on command. He said he’d had a lot of dogs and Boone was the smartest one yet.
    “Like, some things he just knows, like some kind of …”—he tapped his chest—“… thing inside. He just knows.”
    “Yeah!” she said, warming to this, one of her favorite topics. “And some people’re like that, too.”
Like me
, she’d been about to say.
    “Like Charlie,” he was saying. “He’s that way. I’ll be tryna think of something, next thing I know he’s saying it. He’s good at that.”
    “Charlie!” She couldn’t help it. “He never talks, not to me, anyway.”
    “He’s just kinda worn out, that’s all. Early morning, now, that’s his good time.” He laughed. “Four-thirty, five, come then, he’ll fry up a sunny side and tell you whatever you need to know.”
    “About what?” she scoffed, making his eyes flash.
    “All the stuff you don’t get in books,” he said sharply.
    “Like junkyards?” She squirmed with her own smart-assiness, but talking to Max was different from talking to most people. She’d pushed past some barrier. And he liked her for it.
    “Yeah. And, like, how everyone’s always after him about it, but like Charlie says, here we are on a dying planet, and they just keep on making things to break down, for the economy, so if it wasn’t for him, where would it go, all the broken stuff? Everything’d be an even bigger mess when you think about it.”
    She tried considering Charlie in such heroic light, unappreciated and performing a service to humanity with his haphazard mountains of useless goods right