FEED THE BABY OF LOVE
Orson Scott Card
When Rainie Pinyon split this time she didn’t go south, even though it was October and she didn’t like the winter cold. Maybe she thought that this winter she didn’t deserve to be warm, or maybe she wanted to find some unfamiliar territory—whatever. She got on the bus in Bremerton and got off it again in Boise. She hitched to Salt Lake City and took a bus to Omaha. She got herself a waitressing job, using the name Ida Johnson, as usual. She quit after a week, got another job in Kansas City, quit after three days, and so on and so on until she came to a tired-looking cafe in Harmony, Illinois, a small town up on the bluffs above the Mississippi. She liked Harmony right off, because it was pretty and sad—half the storefronts brightly painted and cheerful, the other half streaked and stained, the windows boarded up. The kind of town that would be perfectly willing to pick up and move into a shopping mall, only nobody wanted to build one here and so they’d just have to make do. The help wanted sign in the cafe window was so old that several generations of spiders had lived and died on webs between the sign and the glass.
“We’re a five-calendar cafe,” said the pinched-up overpainted old lady at the cash register.
Rainie looked around and sure enough, there were five calendars on the walls.
. . .
