Stick by Elmore Leonard

Author:Elmore Leonard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf

Kyle put on shorts and a tennis shirt and left the guest house with no purpose but to walk, feel herself doing something physical. She walked past hedges and walls that enclosed the wealth of the kind of people she counseled, walked east to the Atlantic Ocean, a neutral ground, and took off her sneakers to wander an empty stretch of shoreline.

She had said to her dad, “The money’s great, but there’s no satisfaction. I want to do something, see tangible results.” He told her to drop her start-up companies going public and get back on the Board quick, for the upswing. She said to her dad, “Do you know what I wanted to be when I was little? A cop . . . No, not ever a nurse or a nun.” She had played guns with her brothers and baseball in Central Park and at school in Boston, the boys amazed she didn’t throw like a girl. She side-armed snowballs at cops in ’69 demonstrating on the Commons, knit scarf flying, nose running, perspiring in her pea-coat, drinking beer after and smoking pot; into living. Now: “There’s no excitement anymore. I watch. I’m a spectator.”

Her dad said get married, raise a family. When she felt like trading, pick up the phone.

“Who do I marry?”

Lot of bright young guys on the Street to choose from, share a common interest.

Like dating sociology majors at school: have something to talk about. Except that textbook conversations ran out of gas and when they took the Orange Line to Dudley Station and prowled through Roxbury she found she could not study “real people” statistically: they were in a life that made hers seem innocent make-believe. Still, she was drawn to the street, fascinated, feeling a rapport she didn’t understand.

Kyle had brought that home from school and her dad said there was the Street and there was the street. One was neither more real nor unreal than the other. Kyle said, except one was concocted, invented in the name of commerce; while the other was concerned with existence, degrees of survival. She would talk about social and economic inequalities and watch her dad doze off in his chair.

Today there was still a distinction in her mind. Comparing her Street with the ghetto street—or with rural, suburban or industrial streets, for that matter—she felt insulated, left out of life. She dealt in paper, in notes, contracts, certificates, coupons, with a self-conscious feeling of irrelevance.

On her recent trip home Kyle said to her dad, “I think I want to get into manufacturing, make something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, it’s down the road. Maybe something in genetic engineering.”

“Pie in the sky. You want to be realistic, buy a stamping plant in Detroit and go out of your mind that way.”

“Or get into a service business that deals with people who need help on a survival level.”

“The public defender complex. I thought you got over that in Boston.”

“You’ve got an answer for everything, haven’t you?”

“I hope to God I do,” her dad said.

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