Read The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer for Free Online Page B

there is nothing wrong with being a waitress,” she told him. “It’s a perfectly respectable occupation. Our own daughter’s been working as a waitress, must I remind you.”
    “Oh, great, Maggie; another of your logical progressions.”
    “One thing about you that I really cannot stand,” she said, “is how you act so superior. We can’t have just a civilized back-and-forth discussion; oh, no. No, you have to make a point of how illogical I am, what a whifflehead I am, how you’re so cool and above it all.”
    “Well, at least I don’t spill my life story in public eating places,” he told her.
    “Oh, just let me out,” she said. “I cannot bear your company another second.”
    “Gladly,” he said, but he went on driving.
    “Let me out, I tell you!”
    He looked over at her. He slowed down. She picked up her purse and clutched it to her chest.
    “Are you going to stop this car,” she asked, “or do I have to jump from a moving vehicle?”
    He stopped the car.
    Maggie got out and slammed the door. She started walking back toward the café. For a moment it seemed that Ira planned just to sit there, but then she heard him shift gears and drive on.
    The sun poured down a great wash of yellow light, and her shoes made little cluttery sounds on the gravel. Her heart was beating extra fast. She felt pleased, in a funny sort of way. She felt almost drunk with fury and elation.
    She passed the first of the ranch houses, where weedy flowers waved along the edge of the front yard and a tricycle lay in the driveway. It certainly was quiet. All she could hear was the distant chirping of birds—their
chink! chink! chink!
and
video! video! video!
in the trees far across the fields. She’d lived her entire life with the hum of the city, she realized. You’d think Baltimore was kept running by some giant, ceaseless, underground machine. How had she stood it? Just like that, she gave up any plan for returning. She’d been heading toward the café with some vague notion of asking for the nearest Trailways stop, or maybe hitching a ride back home with a reliable-looking trucker; but what was the point of going home?
    She passed the second ranch house, which had a mailbox out front shaped like a covered wagon. A fence surrounded the property—just whitewashed stumps linked by swags of whitewashed chain, purely ornamental—and she stopped next to one of the stumps and set her purse on it to take inventory. The trouble with dress-up purses was that they were so small. Her everyday purse, a canvas tote, could have kept her going for weeks. (“You give the line ‘Who steals my purse steals trash’ a whole new meaning,” her mother had once remarked.) Still, she hadthe basics: a comb, a pack of Kleenex, and a lipstick. And in her wallet, thirty-four dollars and some change and a blank check. Also two credit cards, but the check was what mattered. She would go to the nearest bank and open the largest account the check would safely cover—say three hundred dollars. Why, three hundred dollars could last her a long time! Long enough to find work, at least. The credit cards, she supposed, Ira would very soon cancel. Although she might try using them just for this weekend.
    She flipped through the rest of the plastic windows in her wallet, passing her driver’s license, her library card, a school photo of Daisy, a folded coupon for Affinity shampoo, and a color snapshot of Jesse standing on the front steps at home. Daisy was double-exposed—it was all the rage last year—so her precise, chiseled profile loomed semitransparent behind a full-face view of her with her chin raised haughtily. Jesse wore his mammoth black overcoat from Value Village and a very long red fringed neck scarf that dangled below his knees. She was struck—she was almost injured—by his handsomeness. He had taken Ira’s one drop of Indian blood and transformed it into something rich and stunning: high polished cheekbones, straight black hair, long