Read Online Linger by M. E. Kerr - Free Book Online

He was breathing hard.
    I should have said that it was me he should talk to, not Dunlinger, but all I managed to say to him was “Don’t hurt him.”
    Then he turned and looked at me and shook his head.
    “Hurt him?” he said. “I could never do to him what he has done to himself. He has become what he is, and now he lives with it.”
    As soon as Mr. Elizondo left, Mr. Dunlinger said to me, “Let’s get out of here!”
    He didn’t want to talk in front of the cook and the one busboy who was in the back stacking plates.
    “Just forget it happened,” he told me out in the hall.
    He was angry, and it made me hate myself and him.
    I said, “Next time say it was me who did it. Don’t protect me, okay? Don’t do me any favors. Okay?”
    “Don’t you do me any more,” he said. He slammed out of there. He didn’t come back until after dinner, when he had Mrs. Dunlinger with him. I never knew what he’d told her about it, if he’d told her anything or let her believe what most people at Linger thought: Some kids started the cat rumor. And the search for undocumented aliens was just routine, and a coincidence.
    After I left work that night I never went back.
    I never told anyone the truth.
    I don’t think he did, either.
    Carlos Elizondo was twelve, The Berryville Record reported, but he always looked older. He was sensitive, they quoted his father; he got scared when the police took him in. He’d only been in this country a year.
    Why Mañana? the paper questioned on its editorial page. A few miles east a Thai restaurant has never been investigated, and across the Canal neither have a Chinese and a Japanese, nor the Mexican one in Kingston. And what about the summer inns throughout the county that hire itinerant help? Why was this one the scapegoat?
    Once I thought I would write a letter to Mr. Elizondo and tell him I was the one, and I was sorry. But who knew where he was, where they had gone after they cleared out of Berryville?

21
    T HANKS A LOT FOR the photographs, Lynn, my brother wrote. Where were they taken? I have never tobogganed, myself. Maybe after this is finished you can show me how. How about it?
    Thumbtacked next to Linger’s Guest Suggestion Box one Sunday morning in February was a petition to get rid of Jules Raleigh.
    It was signed by twenty regular customers. It said:
How can we enjoy the patriotic songs he plays and sings when we know next day he’ll be back on the street with the antiwar demonstrators? We do not feel it is in the spirit of Linger to harbor a flag burner.
    “He never burned a flag,” Lynn Dunlinger told her father. “That’s just hyperbole.”
    She was home for the weekend, staying in Lingering Shadows even though things weren’t finished. My mother was still working on the drapes; the new carpeting hadn’t been installed either.
    Mr. Dunlinger said, “Does your being here every other weekend mean you plan to take over the running of this place?”
    They were standing in the hall, outside The Regency Room.
    She said, “I just don’t think you should fire Mr. Raleigh.”
    “I’m not going to. I’d have to boot you out, too, wouldn’t I?”
    I was trying to sweep up around them. We were expecting The Pennsylvania Realtors for lunch. Everyone was talking about what a good summer it was going to be for rentals and sales and tourist business.
    Everyone was afraid to go to Europe, figuring the terrorists would be out in full force now that the war was raging. My father wouldn’t even let my mother go down to Key West, Florida, to visit Uncle Paul as she did every year. Dad didn’t want her in the air, or in any airport, although President Bush’s wife had taken a commercial flight to Indianapolis to show air travel was safe.
    “Mr. Dunlinger?” I said. “Shall I take the petition down?”
    “No. Any customer who feels obliged to sign it is entitled…. What I want you to do, Gary, is get all those gifts for our servicemen down to the basement. We’re going to