Norwood Read Free

front porch with a dishpan in her lap, shelling peas. She said, “I wonder if Mama and Daddy can look down from heaven tonight and see how nice the yard looks.” Norwood stopped mowing. “I don’t know, Vernell. Did you go down and talk to that woman at the hotel today like I told you to?”
    â€œWell, I had some things to do. I’ll go one day next week.”
    â€œNaw you won’t. You’ll go the first thing in the morning.”
    She cried and took some aspirins and went to bed, but Norwood hauled her out the next morning and made her dress and shave and he told her that she was going to be working at the New Ralph Hotel Coffee Shop that very day or he would know the reason why.
    â€œI don’t feel good, bubba,” she pleaded. “I don’t know how to do it. I’m liable to get the orders wrong.”
    â€œI got you this job and you’re going down there. Just get that through your head.”
    â€œWhat if I get the orders wrong?”
    â€œWell, don’t get’em wrong. Get’em right.”
    â€œI don’t think I can do it.”
    â€œYes, you can.”
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œLook, all you do is write on these tickets what they want and take it back to the cook’s window. Anybody can do that. Listen. A man will come in and you will give him a glass of water and a menu. Then he will study it and decide what he wants. All right. If he wants number two, you put number two on this side of the ticket and then the price over here. He might want some tea too. All right, put a big T under the number two and the price of the tea over there under the number two price. Then when he’s through you add up all the prices and put on the tax and that’s his bill. You ask him if there will be anything else and then give him his bill.”
    â€œI know all that.”
    â€œYou are too afraid of people, Vernell. That’s your trouble.”
    The job worked out too well. Money and position went to Vernell’s head. She stopped crying. Her health and posture improved. She even became something of a flirt. She grew daily more confident and assertive and at home she would drop the names of prominent Lions and Kiwanians. Norwood listened in cold silence as she brought home choice downtown gossip and made familiar references to undertakers and lawyers and Ford dealers. Norwood had nothing to counter with. No one you could quote traded at the Nipper station. The customers were local Negroes and high school kids, and out-of-state felons in flight from prosecution and other economy-minded transients, most of whom carried their own strange motor oil in their back seats, oil that was stranger and cheaper than anything even in the Nipper inventory. Some weeks, with her tips, Vernell made more money than Norwood. It was a terrible state of affairs and Norwood would not have believed that things were to become worse almost overnight.
    Then with absolutely no warning Vernell married a disabled veteran named Bill Bird and brought him home to live in the little house on the highway. Bill Bird was an older man. He had drifted into Ralph for no very clear reason after being discharged from the VA hospital in Dallas. He took a room at the New Ralph Hotel, monthly rate, and passed his time in the coffee shop, at the corner table under the fan, reading Pageant and Grit and pondering the graphs in U.S. News & World Report . Vernell took to Bill Bird at once. She liked his quiet, thoughtful air and his scholarship. She kept his cup filled with coffee and during lulls she would sit at his table and enjoy him. Bill Bird was at the same time attentive to Vernell in many little ways.
    One afternoon she said, “I declare, Bill, you just read all the time. It must make your eyes hurt.”
    Bill Bird shook himself out of a hypnotic reading trance and put his paper down and rose to offer her a chair. “Sit down, Vernell. Relax for a minute. You’re