Read Online Who Will Run the Frog Hospital by Lorrie Moore - Free Book Online Page B

stared.
    “This is for us,” I whispered. “This is all for you.”
    “The money?” She wasn’t comprehending.
    I checked the door again. I closed the window and the shades and then sat at my dressing table on the spinning, plush-covered, vanity stool. I turned on the makeup mirror for light. I turned it to Office, its sickly green, and laughed in a cackly way, though I didn’t mean to. “I took it,” I said.
    “You took it?”
    “I collected it. I kind of—hocked it. I just, I sold stubs and didn’t ring up.”
    She looked at me and then at the money for a long time. A pumpkin into a coach: I hoped that was what she would see. For today, Tuesday, I would be her fairy godmother. I tried to swallow, but the pot had made my throat bitter and dry, my gums drained and astringed. I had to concentrate not to giggle. Or weep. Or sing. I had to concentrate to see.
    At long last she looked up at me. “Don’t they count the stubs?” was all she said.
    “Nope,” I said. “Not that I know of.” And then we did laugh. We laughed the laugh of idiots.
    Sils fell into an ironic squawk. “This is going to go on your permanent record, missy,” she said, shaking her finger.
    “We make a dollar sixty-five an hour. Do you think Frank Morenton, who owns half this country anyway, do you think he’d ever notice? He’s too busy opening Santa’s Little Village up in Dalesburg.”
    “I suppose it serves him right for not giving us a raise.” And now she actually reached toward the money to touch it. “Let’s go to the James Gang concert,” she said suddenly. Now she was holding up bills. She plucked up a twenty and waved it around.
    “Pardon me?”
    “The James Gang’s giving an outdoor concert at the arts center at the lake,” said Sils. “God, with this money, we could take a cab.”
    “Maybe I can get LaRoue to drive us,” I said uncertainly. I wanted to save the money. “Let me go see.”
    LaRoue was in the kitchen polishing her riding boots. “We’re thinking of going to a concert,” I said, trying to be kind, lingering, swaying, hinting.
    “And you want me to give you a ride.” She looked disgusted but also a little sad.
    “You want to go with us?” I asked brightly, fakely.
    She looked at her riding boots a long time, as if this were a challenge. The boots were set smack on the kitchen table, on a page of the
Horsehearts Gazette
. “What concert is it?”
    “It’s the James Gang,” I said.
    “What time?”
    God, she was really going to do it. “At eight. But we want to get there by seven.”
    “What about dinner?”
    “It’s get-your-own night, Mom said.” Every so often my mother refused to cook, calling it, with a festive flair, “get-your-own” night, or “fix-your-own.” One year, in one of her darker huffs, she canceled Christmas and called it “Christmas Is Canceled Day.”
    “Yeah, but I was going to make some brownies and macaroni,” said LaRoue. She was hugely overweight, though not even as much as she would be later in life. I blinked.
    “Don’t do that,” I said. “Come with us. We can stop at Carroll’s.” Carroll’s was a fast-food shack that would soon be put out of business by McDonald’s. But at the time, we liked Carroll’s best, the bright red and turquoise colors, the squared and streamlined script of the name.
    “OK!” she said. And as she said it, I realized again that I never did anything with LaRoue because she was odd and friendless and I was embarrassed by her, in a way that made me feel bad, but in a way that was sad and unshakable.
    I sat in the front seat and Sils in the back, and I kept turning around and all the way up to the lake we kept singing “And When I Die,” in the harmony parts we had learned in Girls’ Choir the past year. Our choir director, Miss Field, had worked up a nice arrangement of it.
    “I’m not scared of dyin’ and I don’t really care,’ ” began Sils.
    “ ‘If it’s peace you find in dying, well then let the