Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley Read Online Free

do you, Janie? Do you?”
    Janie thought.
    â€œIf I saw a ghost down there,” he said, “I’d just laugh at it! I’d laugh at it, Janie!” Tina slipped behind the couch. “Do you believe that, Janie?”
    â€œNah,” Janie said. “It’s just what they say.”
    Most of the new hires at the Alexander Henry were girls from the in-town college, and if they hadn’t known each other before becoming popcorn girls, they had friends who had. They were all sorority girls, at least in type. Not the snobby and mean variety, but the variety who knew how to make themselves look cute even in red popcorn girl smocks and health department regulations about loose hair, who knew the right girl giggle or quip for every circumstance, who stayed cheerful and pleasant always, as though they’d never recovered from their high school cheerleader careers. They treated Janie the way they’d treat a person they were visiting in a children’s hospital or a nursing home: with kindness, then forgetfulness, never with inclusion.
    The other three were long-timers, year-rounders. Besides Ronnie, there was Tommie Sue, a long, pointy woman with high, hard hairwho held between her fingers always a phantom cigarette. She had worked at the Alexander Henry for twenty years, longer than anybody else, longer even than Gus, and she reminded him of this regularly without ever speaking to it or of it. Both she and Betty drove into Remington from someplace out in the country, but not the same place, and Betty was snowman-shaped, with a constant sad smile and a tiny silver cross riding her large breasts. Intelligent, competent, organized, Betty had put in fourteen years and usually sold tickets, something the popcorn girls weren’t trusted to do. Tommie Sue was vinyl and wire. Betty, cottonball and artificial flowers. And although neither of them was more like Janie than the sorority girls were, they were far more familiar. They could have come straight out of McCloud County. They were the ones she’d been around all her life.
    It was Tommie Sue who told about the people who had died. When all the movies were at least an hour deep, when the counters had been wiped, the cups restocked, the ashtrays cat shit-cleaned under Gus’s military eye, Tommie Sue would lean against the back of the concession stand between the pop dispenser and Betty, crack her back, cross her arms, and start. The sorority girls tended to cluster at the other end of the counter, where they murmured among themselves, what party, what boy, what bar. While Janie shuffled around the middle, not sure what to do with her hands.
    â€œYou were here, Betty, weren’t you, when that big chunk of plaster came down off there and on that guy’s head?” She gestured with her first two fingers squeezed together to the rococo molding that ran between the high ceiling and the wall. Betty nodded. “Must have hit him just right. Knocked him dead on the carpet.” Tommie Sue rolled her eyes back in her head a little to remember. The gold-flecked mirror behind her reflected her dark, undyed hair, defiant, the few white strands as fine as cobweb and invisible in the atmospheric lobby light.
    From across the room, poised to prop the theater doors the moment the Return of the Jedi credit music rolled, Gus glared at Tommie Sue. Tommie Sue, at least eight inches taller, gazed evenly back. “Worst one was the manager before Gus. Blew his brains out in the office upstairs while he was counting receipts. If that wasn’t a mess.”
    â€œYou all get ready for this exit!” Gus yelled. The sorority cluster bustled into place. Janie stood at attention over the candy. After a long minute, Tommie Sue reached under the counter, picked up a big stack of the booklets that had come with that year’s James Bond, Octopussy , and strode out into the lobby. She flagged them in front of the departing movie watchers.
    â€œPussy