From Herring to Eternity Read Online Free

ownership, since what would I do with old glass bottles and discarded poultry bones except turn them over to a museum or historical society anyway?
    But the steamroller nature of the thing ticked me off. You don’t come up to a person you never met and give them an edict followed by a threat followed by a possible insult. I planned to raise a stink about that , maybe cost Mr. Dickson some future billable hours.
    I ordered my potatoes from Chris Hunter, the Veg-o-Tater, an organic vendor who sold primarily to the growing vegan community and abhorred, with a flaming passion, the kind of greasy foods I serve.
    “I hate what you turn these spuds into,” he said again—good-naturedly, but not.
    “You might as well just have that printed on my invoices,” I said.
    “It’s not just you,” he said. “Most of the city entombs flavor in clouds of boiling oil.”
    “Canola oil,” I pointed out. “My grandmother used to use lard.”
    He shuddered audibly and hung up.
    I was about to get the university’s telephone number online when I heard noise from the dining room. There were shouts, tables and chairs scraping, dishes and silverware banging.
    “What is this, tsimes day?”
    Mad’s comment about the unhappy planet echoed in my brain.
    The commotion out front couldn’t be Homeless Elijah. He always smelled very ripe and was occasionally belligerent, depending on what he’d been drinking, but he always came to the back door for handouts. I guessed it was either a mouse or Andrew had come back and Thom was beating him to death. I hurried out.
    Thom, A.J., and Raylene were in the open doorway and a small crowd was looking down the street. At least the uproar wasn’t about anything happening in the restaurant. Thom turned before I got there. She had an eerie sensitivity about movement in the restaurant, almost like she was a Lutz in Amityville.
    “Someone said Karen Kerr got into a fight with Lippy Montgomery,” she said.
    “K-Two?” I said. “The mountain-size mixed martial arts fighter who has horseradish with everything?”
    A.J. nodded. “She’s one deadly beyatch. I’ve seen her compete.”
    “You have?” I said.
    “My daughter wanted to go so I took her,” A.J. said.
    “Why would anyone want to fight with Lippy?” Thom said. “He’s a pussycat.”
    “I’ve got pussycats,” I said. “I kick them just because.”
    Thom looked at me crossly.
    “Kidding,” I said.
    A.J. was standing on her tiptoes, trying to see. “Too many people in the way—can’t tell what’s going on,” she said as she went back to work at the counter.
    “Well, whatever happened, it doesn’t concern us,” I pointed out as a pair of sirens converged on the street.
    “Nash, this is our community,” Raylene said portentously. “Everything should concern us.”
    “You’re just nosey,” I said.
    “That, too,” she admitted.
    As I turned to go back to the office, I heard someone in the street shout, “My God, he’s dead!”
    That sent Raylene and Thom out into the street. I hesitated, not because I planned to join them, but, because—if it were true—that’s what you do when someone you know dies. You pause and reflect on who they were and try again, in vain, to grasp the elusive reality of “here one second, gone the next.” Lippy was a weird egg but a good one.
    I noticed, then, that Mad was still there. The table had been cleared and she was just sitting, staring. It wasn’t as if she were in a self-induced trance, because she moved a finger and blinked and smiled now and then. It was more like she was watching a movie play out in her head.
    And then she turned—not toward me, but to the door. I followed her gaze and a moment later, someone entered. It was a woman I had never seen, about three hundred pounds worth, with puffy green hair and a pair of wide-open eyes tattooed on her temples and on her left eye. She wore a patch over her right eye and was wearing a long, black skirt with purple moon symbols