Boonville Read Online Free Page B

would slink back to his lunchtable pals, cursing,“Stuck-up bitch!” High school ended. She didn’t go to prom. She didn’t care. She got to go to college, the other girls didn’t.
    She matriculated at Arizona State to study teaching like her mother. The girls in her dormitory compared her looks to Myrna Loy’s and were shocked that she had never dated. Edna was astounded that they had no intention of pursuing a career outside of being a rich man’s wife. They called her “the last suffragette.” “We already have the vote,” they’d say. “What else do you want?” Edna didn’t know, something. But to appease them, she dated Wayne Gibson, a business major from Honolulu who kept his tan year-round as captain of the A.S.U. golf team. She went along with the relationship like a guest served burnt food, forcing a look of satisfaction, never asking for seconds. They graduated, Edna with honors, Wayne a scratch golfer. They married and moved to Hawaii where Wayne was handed the family fortune, which he dropped in a series of bad investments. After selling their beachfront property, stating, “Nobody’s going to want to vacation here anymore, not after Pearl Harbor,” he invested in a chain of miniature-golf-course-Laundromats. They moved to Florida. Babies came, one after the other; Wayne named them, Edna raised them. They bought twin beds. Too late.
    â€œNone of it was my idea,” Grandma revealed to John after his grandfather had died. “I never wanted to teach, I never wanted children,” she paused, taking a pop from her glass of gin. “And I never wanted your grandfather. The only thing he knew how to do was play golf and lose money. I used to sit in our house and pray to God he’d die of heatstroke on the tee of the eighteenth hole. I’d take over the finances, and he wouldn’t get to finish his round.”
    â€œImagine,” she continued, John transfixed, “We had once owned acres of Waikiki Beach and then there we were in the concrete squalor of South Florida sitting behind that ‘Putt and Dry’ with only a pocket full of quarters. And once we had children, your grandfather disappeared. I’ll tell you, his absence became the only thing he had to offer me. This is a man’s world. They don’t even let women think about the possibilities. Now that he’s really gone, I’m doing as I please!”
    She took their bank book and her dog-eared copy of Emily Dickinson and flew to the self-actualizing confines of the Left Coast. The answer was obvious.
    For the bartender’s benefit, John briefly explained how Grandma had moved from Florida when he was fourteen, communicating through letters and telephone calls. She sent books for his birthday: Grace Paley, Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell. It was part of a deal that hinged on the understanding that he would never visit and she would never return. In fact, he still had to get the keys to her cabin from a friend of hers named Pensive Prairie Sunset.
    â€œAw shit!” the bartender let loose. “Is your grandmother’s place up on Manchester Road?”
    â€œI think so,” John answered, reaching into his pocket for a slip of paper ripped from a pad of Leggiere and Philips stationery, the scrawl close to illegible, as if he had hoped to get lost from his own directions.
    â€œI’ll be a sonofabitch,” the bartender said, when John confirmed the address as either 312 or 317 Manchester Road, unable to decipher the last digit. “Your grandma’s the Squirrel Lady!”
    â€œShe’s just Grandma to me,” John replied, but could see the bartender recognized something in his features.
    â€œI know folks come here to get weird, but the Squirrel Lady must have started way before she hit Boont,” the bartender insisted. “I never had no problems with her, except winnin’ one of her squirrels in a raffle. Pissy