I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Read Online Free

humiliated at this point. I started to page through a book of photographs of polar bears and Eskimos and stark landscapes.
    â€œThat’s not how you raised me to talk,” Robert said. “You’re becoming what you say you didn’t like about your own mother in Alabama, Grandma. An old back-porch gossip. Larry’s never been anything but friendly to me. He’s got a name, by the way. Larry.”
    Pinnie adjusted the dashboard fan so Mrs. Boxer could benefit more from it.
    â€œLarry might be unemployed,” Pinnie said. “Just because he dresses like a toothbrush salesman doesn’t mean he’s employed selling toothbrushes.” Truth was, I had no idea what my father did for a living. Maybe he did sell toothbrushes.
    â€œThat’s also true,” Mrs. Boxer said. “It’s my son-in-law I’m worried about, though. Peter’s a good man, but he shouldn’t agree with all this man’s opinions—is
my
opinion.”
    â€œHe’s got opinions. He’s got opinions. And some are excitable. But Larry speaks like a very well-educated man, Grandma,” Robert said. “Okay, he’s maybe
uncomfortable,
like you say. However you mean that.”
    â€œI’ve never once heard him say anything personal about his life,” Mrs. Boxer said. “Such as, does he have a wife, does he have a family? Nothing.”
    â€œWell,” Pinnie said, “if he doesn’t have a wife and family, he’s not going to mention them, is he?”
    There was agreement on this sentiment all around. Everyone drank their Nehi oranges in silence. Then Mrs. Boxer looked at me and said, “Did you ever meet this Larry? Come to think of it, Howard, I’ve never seen you inside the apothecary, come to think of it. You’re either in this bookmobile or you’re standing next to this bookmobile.”
    â€œI’ve seen him through the window,” I said.
    â€œNot quite the same thing as being in a room with somebody, Lord knows,” Mrs. Boxer said.
    â€œMaybe he’s got no other daytime place to go,” Pinnie said. “It’s a free country, as long as he pays for his coffee.”
    The conversation moved on.
    Â 
    During a mid-July stop in front of Union High School, a man returned a book on interlibrary loan,
North American Indian Waterfowl Traps, Weirs, and Snares.
At such moments, the basic transaction of borrowing or returning, I would often attempt to be a student of people. I’d scrutinize a face, size up a person, make a private assessment, indulge in speculation as to what sort would be interested in this or that particular book. I’d even speculate about which room a person read in at home—kitchen, living room, bedroom, screened-in porch—and other sorts of domestic tableaux, attempting to think narratively, to put each person at the center of the story of his or her life.
    One day Pinnie caught me exhibiting a severe frown, part of an overall expression of doubt toward a borrower, a woman who was teaching a summer course at Union High. Soon after this teacher left the bookmobile, he said, “That look you get on your face, it isn’t exactly welcoming. It doesn’t fit the etiquette of my bookmobile. You squint like you’re trying to hypnotize somebody. You should see yourself. Goodness sake, the person’s just returning a book. You make it like you want to sit them down in an empty room at the police station. You know, bare light bulb overhead. ‘Sir—ma’am—why’d you choose that particular book, anyway?’ Like every day’s an episode of
Dragnet.
Try and stop doing that, okay?”
    That evening, without officially noting on an interlibrary loan form that it had been punctually returned to the bookmobile, I slipped
North American Indian Waterfowl Traps, Weirs, and Snares
into my weather-beaten knapsack, in there with the tangerine peels from my lunch. I