Boonville Read Online Free Page A

light, swirled it, and then took a sip.
    â€œJammy,” he said, as if he had stomped the grapes himself.
    His companion sampled hers, seemingly satisfied. The bartender returned the bottle to its shelf, marked a check with a pencil and set the bill in front of them in a brandy snifter. The two kissed as if the bartender’s tip was to witness their affection. He swabbed a wet spot to their right with a towel, wiped his hands on his apron, and slid back to John.
    â€œI should have left them the bottle,” he whispered. “And bet they couldn’t make it back to the bright lights inside an hour. Highpockety prack.”
    John wasn’t familiar with the expression, wondering if it was a bit of the local language, but as a native Floridian used to tourists making the rounds in Mickey Mouse ears, he felt he got the gist of it.
    â€œWhere you from?” the bartender asked, peeking at the couple like he had served them hemlock and was waiting for it to kick in. “You look like you got more sense than to be from around here.”
    â€œMiami,” John answered.
    â€œShould have known by the tan,” the bartender said. “Almost mistook you for a workin’ man.”
    â€œI work,” John replied, not wanting to talk shop about the job he had quit. “But my grandmother died recently, so I’m moving out here into her place.”
    â€œSorry to hear that,” the bartender said.
    â€œThat I’m moving to Boonville or that my grandmother died?” John asked.
    â€œBoth,” the bartender told him. “This town is hard on the young and it’s never easy losin’ family. Plus, bad luck runs in threes. You got somethin’ else waitin’ on you.”
    â€œI’m not superstitious,” John said, although he was the kind of person who hedged his bets, throwing salt, knocking wood, avoiding the underneath of ladders. He wouldn’t stoop for a penny on the ground unless it was faced heads up. Out loud, he claimed superstitions were for idiots. In private, he read his horoscope and cringed at unfortuitous fortune cookies. Christina once rearranged their furniture for good feng shui, demanding he buy a mirror for the entryway of the apartment to access their “career center.” Why pull on trouble’s braid? He did as he was told. He didn’t solicit occult information, but always felt better if someone was predicting happiness instead of doom.
    â€œGrandma and I weren’t close,” he told the bartender, trying to distance himself from a woman whose whole life seemed snakebit.
    Edna Woodhull Nesbitt had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time, not that there would have been a right place or right time. If you had asked her, she would have told you the world was rigged against all women. But being born eccentric in Arizona in 1915 without a father did her no favors. On her seventh birthday, her schoolmarm widow of a mother gave her a copy of The Works of Emily Dickinson , relaying emphatically, “This is our legacy. Stay away from those Bronte sisters.” Edna carried it with her wherever she went, sitting for hours in the Tucson sun, reading over and over, “I never saw a moor, I never saw the sea; Yet know I how the heather looks, And what a wave must be.” She took long walks and had conversations with dead writers. She was at the top of her class at school, but indifferent to classmates. “Why doesn’t she come play?” the other girls would ask. Edna thought the answer was obvious.
    When her figure took shape at sixteen, it isolated her even further. Occasionally, a teen smelling of pomade and puberty would cross the cafeteria, eyes of the school upon him, and ask her to a movie. “Are you kidding?” she would say, unsure if the boy was being sincere, thinking to herself, “Wasn’t he making fun of my breasts in gym class?” Her confusion sounded like a refusal and the boy