Isabel's Daughter by Judith Ryan Hendricks

Author:Judith Ryan Hendricks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, Chick Lit
ISBN: 9780060503468
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-27T09:42:32+00:00

From day one of my very first semester, I loved the university. Probably because I could only take one or two classes each session, each one seemed inordinately significant. Rita and I spent hours poring over the class schedule at the end of every term, analyzing, debating the options, deciding what to take next. We felt sorry for the kids that zipped through in four years and then left. Kind of like the joke Rita liked to tell about the cowboy sex manual: In. Out. Repeat if necessary.

I could’ve contradicted her on that, but I never did, since my experience was limited to one cowboy.

Not that Rita and Jennifer, the other waitress at Pete’s, didn’t try. They were always trying to fix me up with friends of their current boyfriends, but it never took. The “possibles,” as Rita called them, ranged from rumpled intellectuals in black T-shirts to short-haired cowboys in tight jeans to the occasional business school yuppie.

I got pretty good at predicting their political views and music preference within ten minutes of meeting them. One thing they seemed to have in common was wanting to have sex immediately. Some of them tried to loosen you up with alcohol or maybe smoking a joint. Some wanted to talk you into bed, which was almost worse. The end result was the same, and you had to listen to a lot of bullshit before you got there.

For the most part, I was happier alone. I knew by then that Cassie was right—I wasn’t ugly. Not brilliant, but not stupid. Maybe too serious. I didn’t laugh enough.

I read the magazine articles that Rita kept pushing under my nose, about how to get a guy’s attention. How to flirt. How to tell if someone was good “relationship material.” So it wasn’t that I didn’t know how the game was played, it was more that I couldn’t bring myself to unbutton those top two buttons. To appear fascinated when I felt like dozing off.

To pretend an interest in football or the stock market or politics. So most Saturday nights found me in bed with a book instead of a guy. And when Rita got home, whether Saturday night or Sunday morning, she was only too happy to share the details, and I got my cheap thrills vicariously.

Working at Sneaky Pete’s was okay, too. The food was good enough that I wasn’t embarrassed to serve it to people. Rita and Jennifer and I got along fine, and Pete assumed the role of our protective, if slightly befuddled, father figure.

I knew there were places where the money would be better—night shift at the convenience store, for example. But there, you never knew whether the next person who walked through the door might stand you up against the wall and shoot you in the back of the head.

A couple of the women I knew from my old days at the house were making pretty good money doing telemarketing. But I could never do that—sit and call people who don’t want to talk to you and try to sell them things they don’t need? No thanks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.