Read The assistant for Free Online Page A

spoke. Then the grocer, to ease the other's mood, casually inquired, "Where in the neighborhood lives your sister? Maybe I know her." Frank answered in a monotone. "I forget the exact address. Near the park somewheres." "What is her name?" "Mrs. Garibaldi." "What kind name is this?" "What do you mean?" Frank stared at him. "I mean the nationality?" "Italian. I am of Italian extraction. My name is Frank Alpine-Alpino in Italian." The smell of Frank Alpine's cigarette compelled Morris to light his butt. He thought he could control his cough and tried but couldn't. He coughed till he feared his head would pop off. Frank watched with interest. Ida banged on the floor upstairs, and the grocer ashamedly pinched his cigarette and dropped it into the garbage pail. "She don't like me to smoke," he explained between coughs. "My lungs ain't so healthy." "Who don't?" "My wife. It's a catarrh some kind. My mother had it all her life and lived till eighty-four. But they took a picture of my chest last year and found two dried spots. This frightened my wife." Frank slowly put out his cigarette. "What I started out to say before about my life," he said heavily, "is that I have had a funny one, only I don't mean funny. I mean I've been through a lot. I've been close to some wonderful things- jobs, for instance, education, women, but close is as far as I go." His hands were tightly clasped between his knees. "Don't ask me why, but sooner or later everything I think is worth having gets away from me in some way or other. I work like a mule for what I want, and just when it looks like I am going to get it I make some kind of a stupid move, and everything that is just about nailed down tight blows up in my face." "Don't throw away your chance for education," Morris advised. "It's the best thing for a young man." "I could've been a college graduate by now, but when the time came to start going, I missed out because something else turned up that I took instead. With me one wrong thing leads to another and it ends in a trap. I want the moon so all I get is cheese." "You are young yet." "Twenty-five," he said bitterly. "You look older." "I feel old-damn old." Morris shook his head. "Sometimes I think your life keeps going the way it starts out on you," Frank went on. "The week after I was born my mother was dead and buried. I never saw her face, not even a picture. When I was five years old, one day my old man leaves this furnished room where we were staying, to get a pack of butts. He takes off and that was the last I ever saw of him. They traced him years later but by then he was dead. I was raised in an orphans' home and when I was eight they farmed me out to a tough family. I ran away ten times, also from the next people I lived with. I think about my life a lot. I say to myself, 'What do you expect to happen after all of that?' Of course, every now and again, you understand, I hit some nice good spots in between, but they are few and far, and usually I end up like I started out, with nothing." The grocer was moved. Poor boy. "I've often tried to change the way things work out for me but I don't know how, even when I think I do. I have it in my heart to do more than I can remember." He paused, cleared his throat and said, "That makes me sound stupid but it's not as easy as that. What I mean to say is that when I need it most something is missing in me, in me or on account of me. I always have this dream where I want to tell somebody something on the telephone so bad it hurts, but then when I am in the booth, instead of a phone being there, a bunch of bananas is hanging on a hook." He gazed at the grocer then at the floor. "All my life I wanted to accomplish something worthwhile-a thing people will say took a little doing, but I don't. I am too restless- six months in any one place is too much for me. Also I grab at everything too quick-too impatient. I don't do what I have to-that's what I mean. The result is I move into a place with nothing, and