Read Short Stories: Five Decades for Free Online

thirty bucks. Is it the right length?”
    “Uhuh,” Lenore said. “Eleven and a half pages. This is a very good one, Andy.”
    “Yeah,” Andrew said, closing his eyes. “Put it next to Moby Dick on your library shelf.”
    “It’s very exciting,” Lenore said, standing up. “I don’t know what they’re complaining about.”
    “You’re a lovely girl.” Andrew put his hands over his eyes and rubbed around and around. “I have wooden hinges on my eyelids. Do you sleep at night?”
    “Don’t do that to your eyes.” Lenore started to put on her coat. “You only aggravate them.”
    “You’re right.” Andrew dug his fists into his eyes and rotated them slowly. “You don’t know how right you are.”
    “Tomorrow. At ten o’clock?” Lenore asked.
    “At ten o’clock. Dig me out of the arms of sleep. We shall leave Dusty Blades to his fate for this week and go on with the further adventures of Ronnie Cook and His Friends, forty dollars a script. I always enjoy writing Ronnie Cook much better than Dusty Blades. See what ten dollars does to a man.” He opened his eyes and watched Lenore putting her hat on in front of the mirror. When he squinted, she was not so plain-looking. He felt very sorry for Lenore, plain as sand, with her flat-colored face and her hair pulled down like rope, and never a man to her name. She was putting on a red hat with a kind of ladder arrangement going up one side. It looked very funny and sad on her. Andrew realized that it was a new hat. “That’s a mighty fine hat,” he said.
    “I thought a long time before I bought this hat,” Lenore said, flushing because he’d noticed it.
    “Har- riet! ” The governess next door screamed in the alley to the next-door neighbor’s little girl. “Harriet, get away from there this minute!”
    Andrew turned over on his stomach on the couch and put a pillow over his head. “Have you got any ideas for Ronnie Cook and His Friends for tomorrow?” he asked Lenore.
    “No. Have you?”
    “No.” He pulled the pillow tight around his head.
    “You’ll get them by tomorrow,” Lenore said. “You always do.”
    “Yeah,” said Andrew.
    “You need a vacation,” Lenore said.
    “Get out of here.”
    “Good-bye,” Lenore started out. “Get a good night’s sleep.”
    “Anything you say.”
    Andrew watched her with one eye as she went off the porch on which he worked and through the living room and dining room, toward the stairs. She had nice legs. You were always surprised when a girl with a face like that had nice legs. But she had hair on her legs. She was not a lucky girl. “Oh, no,” Andrew said as the door closed behind her, “you are not a lucky girl.”
    He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The sun came in through the open windows and the curtains blew softly over his head and the sun was warm and comforting on his closed eyes. Across the street, on the public athletic field, four boys were shagging flies. There would be the neat pleasant crack of the bat and a long time later the smack of the ball in the fielder’s glove. The tall trees outside, as old as Brooklyn, rustled a little from time to time as little spurts of wind swept across the baseball field.
    “Harr iet !” the governess called. “Stop that or I will make you stand by yourself in the corner all afternoon! Harriet! I demand you to stop it!” The governess was French. She had the only unpleasant French accent Andrew had ever heard.
    The little girl started to cry, “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma, she’s going to hit me!” The little girl hated the governess and the governess hated the little girl, and they continually reported each other to the little girl’s mother. “Mamma!”
    “You are a little liar,” the governess screamed. “You will grow up, and you will be a liar all your life. There will be no hope for you.”
    “Mamma!” wailed the little girl.
    They went inside the house and it was quiet again.
    “Charlie,” one of the boys on the baseball field