Read Online Lilac Mines by Cheryl Klein - Free Book Online Page A

man’s. There are so many things Anna Lisa doesn’t know how to do: talk to boys, order a drink, buy a bus ticket apparently. Are these skills a matter of time or destiny? What would happen if she transformed herself into a person like Suzy? If she walked up to the man at the bar and said something friendly? She reminds herself that nothing will come of it—she’s returning to Fresno in a few days—and this emboldens her.
    She slides onto a stool near the man with the beer, leaving a stool between them. The bartender is on the other side of the square bar, twirling a rag on his finger with a blend of boredom and intense concentration. The man glances up at her, then back down. Anna Lisa wills herself to look at him. She takes in his profile: small straight nose, soft chin, freckles a shade lighter than her own. Blonde eyebrows that fade out at the edges. And somewhere in these details lies a revelation. The man is a woman.
    â€œHi,” she says, which is what she’d planned to say to a man, too. She did not know a woman could look like this. She did not know that girl hips could find a home in straight brown trousers. As alien as the ensemble is, she’s the right alien for it; on her planet, this must be what women look like.
    â€œHey,” she says. Her voice is dark ale.
    â€œDo you live here?” Anna Lisa needs to know where this planet is.
    â€œWhat’s it to you?”
    â€œI just wondered…” Anna Lisa stutters. “I was going to San Francisco,” she adds, as if this explains her presence in Lilac Mines.
    The woman makes a face not unlike John’s, but it’s just a stopping point on her way to a full smile. “Well, this ain’t San Francisco. But sure, I live here. It’s not so bad.”
    â€œI’m Anna Lisa.”
    The woman laughs. “Seriously? You sure don’t look like an Anna Lisa.”
    Anna Lisa has never thought about what she looked like, name-wise. It’s just something she was born into. Now she has a burning desire to know what she does look like, but she can’t ask; it would seem flirtatious.
    â€œName’s Jody.” Indeed, Jody looks like a Jody: Irish, tough, friendly, boyish. “Hey, what’re you drinking?”
    â€œUm, I’m not. I’m too young, and besides—”
    â€œGotta start sometime, right?” Jody waves to the bartender. “A Pabst for my friend, Anna Lisa.” She says it in that inside-joke way, and in this faraway bar with a woman who looks like a man, Anna Lisa feels like one of the girls. The warmth in her chest is so strong and rare that she can’t send back the bottle that lands in front of her, an uncapped twin to Jody’s.
    Is it possible that Jody is buying the beer for her? She’s not sure if she wants this to be the case or not, but when the bartender—his fingers tickling the rag at his side, promising to return to it—says, “Sixty-five cents,” Jody doesn’t reach for the wallet that bulges from her back pocket.
    So Anna Lisa extracts her coin purse, which she suddenly wishes were a real wallet. She touches the coins it would take to pay for the beer. She touches the sleeping bills next to them. Blood races past her ears. “Can I also get a ham and cheese sandwich?” she hears herself saying. The words make her hunger rear up, stomp its feet. “And a side of mashed potatoes?” she says. “And a strawberry shake?”
    â€œAll right,” Jody says. “That’s what I call a real man’s appetite.” If Anna Lisa’s mother said she was eating like a man, she’d be telling her daughter to slow down, chew 20 times before swallowing. But from Jody it sounds like a compliment.
    Jody washes dishes at “this bar down on Calla Boulevard” four nights a week and is helping a man fix his barn. What Jody really wants is a job at the sawmill, she says. That’s where the