The Pinballs: Chapters 8–15

“I could make up my list in two seconds. Hong Kong Nurse. That’s the only really good book I ever read. You ought to try it. After that I read Peace Corps Nurse and Nurse of the Yukon, but they weren’t as good. Not enough romance.”

“Carlie, would you help me with lunch?” Mrs. Mason called from the kitchen.
“The slave of the world is being summoned,” Carlie said.

“She runs a boutique and I want to see what kind of stuff she’s got.”

Their pictures are on the mantel in the dresses they made.

We’ll start on a real easy halter top.

Mrs. Mason began to take out Carlie’s seam.

Suddenly he wanted to ask about that morning, long ago, when he had come tottering up the road.

There had been no rain in three weeks, and the leaves on the plants were yellow. The vines were shriveled and dead.

In his pocket was the Bensons’ father’s watch and the three gold coins. He had never felt a heavier burden.

“I expected a floating opal three years in a row and you don’t see it hanging around my neck, do you?”

“And I got a cage, food, everything, and I brought him home, and my dad took one look at him, grabbed him up and carried him off. He said it was a matter of principle. He never would even tell me what he had done with Snowball.”

Everyone at the farm, the article said, changed their names and selected other names that were more suitable to their nature.

At home the least thing made her furious. If his father called her casserole “earth food,” she sulked.

She looked at him, astonished.

His father would have to come over the crest of the hill.