Read The Monument for Free Online Page B

wrong with the mouth. Or was it the nose? Silly, isn’t it?” But he turned toward her and smiled.
    “Hello.”
    “Mr. Strum,” Mrs. Langdon said—it was the first time I’d heard his last name. “Mr. Strum, when did you arrive?”
    Mick looked at me, a question in his eyes.
    “Last night,” I said. “I think he got here last night. He was here this morning. Sleeping in his car.” I did not add how he was sleeping.
    “But you were supposed to contact me when you arrived. We had a nice room for you at Carlson’s bed and breakfast.”
    “It was necessary,” Mick said, rising on his feet, “to capture the ambience of the town, the soul of the town. I could hardly have done that in the comfort of a soft bed.”
    “Of course, of course.”
    But I could tell that he wasn’t serious. His voice had changed and out of the corner of his eye I thought I saw him wink at me. Still, he smiled at Mrs. Langdon and nodded.
    “I will accompany you now,” he said, “as soon as I pay my assistant.”
    He looked back through the tablet and tore loose the drawing of Jennings’s dog Rex and handed it to me. “For you.”
    “But I didn’t do anything.”
    “More than you know, more than you’ll ever know.”
    In the orphanage when you got something you didn’t argue about it. There weren’t that many things to come your way but I was trying to change some of those things from the way I did them back then. Like grabbing at food or thinking of myself all the time. But I held back the once and that was enough.
    “Thank you.”
    “You’re very welcome. I will need your assistance again on the morrow. Perhaps you could meet me, along with your trusted companion”—hepointed to Python—“in the morning at the aforementioned bed and breakfast—say at eight o’clock?”
    I had to work of course. I couldn’t leave Fred alone at the grain elevator. But I thought that if I went for the rest of the afternoon and evening and straightened the books out maybe I could take some time in the morning—“on the morrow”—to meet Mick and help him.
    “I’ll try.”
    “Very good.” He turned to Mrs. Langdon. “And now, my dear, proceed.”
    I watched them until they were near title corner. Mrs. Langdon was tall, and he was short-came just over her shoulder, and she bent to talk to him, her finger wagging and her head shaking—and it looked like somebody walking with a messy pet. Chalk dust seemed to poof off him with each step, and he was stained from the work, the drinking, the sleeping in the car. Just before he was out of hearing I remembered something.
    “Don’t eat the eggs,” I called. “They’re older than you.”
    But he didn’t hear me.
    The rest of that day I worked at the elevator and brought all the books up to the minute and had them all ready so Fred could just enter things the next morning. We went home late and I took a hot bath and sat in my bed in my pajamas and looked at the drawing Mick had given me and decided to be an artist.
    It was there—in the drawing. But in more, too, in the way it had been today watching him work, watching him see things, see inside them. I put the drawing on a piece of cardboard and leaned it against the mirror on my little birch dressing table. I watched it until I was nearly asleep, remembering how he had done the lines, the colors, how he worked the chalk with his fingers to make Rex be something on the paper.
    Before I slept there was a soft knock on the door, and Fred and Emma were there to say good night as they did each night before I went to sleep. It reminded me somehow of the orphanage because Sister Gene Autry always came in to say good night to us the same way.
    Emma tucked me in and Fred ruffled my hair and I lay back on the pillow.
    “I’m going to be an artist,” I said.
    “It couldn’t go any other way,” Fred said, nodding. “Ain’t he something?”
    “It’s not just him,” I said. “It’s the drawing, all of it.”
    “I know,” Emma