Queen Serene E-Book

Greta Gorsuch

• Herausgeber: Gemma Open Door for Literacy
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 69

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Meet Queen. She drives a garbage truck in Garnet, way out on the plains of West Texas. Tall and beautiful, Queen wonders what will become of her life. Her marriage did not work out. Her cold husband locked her out. He dumped her boxes in front of the house with a note. She had few job skills. Yet like a tender plant after a terrible winter, Queen puts down roots and grows. Her ex-brother-in-law gets her a job with the City of Garnet Solid Waste Disposal Department. Her boss and coworkers are all men. They tell lots of third-grade jokes, but they've got her back. When she makes enough money to buy a house, they help her move in. Even better, she gets to live across the street from her eighty-seven-year-old grandmother. Betty Cope needs assistance with small day-to-day things. Queen is happy to help, unlike Betty's three daughters. This includes Queen's own mother, Lila. When Betty makes a sudden trip to the hospital, Queen finds herself up against Lila and her Aunt Reba. Reba is an awful rich woman from Dallas. While Queen struggles to stay serene, her mother and aunt do something unbelievable. It's up to Queen to put things right.

Leseprobe

Greta Gorsuch

QUEEN SERENE

Greta Gorsuch has taught ESL/EFL and applied linguistics for more than thirty years in Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. Greta’s work has appeared in journals such as System, Reading in a Foreign Language, Language Teaching, Language Teaching Research, and TESL-EJ. Her first books in the Gemma Open Door Series are The Cell Phone Lot, Key City on the River, and Post Office on the Tokaido. Greta lives in beautiful wide West Texas and goes camping whenever she can.

First published by Gemma in 2020.

Gemma230 Commercial StreetBoston MA 02109 USA

www.gemmamedia.com

©2020 by Greta Gorsuch

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

978-1-936846-86-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gorsuch, Greta, author.

Title: Queen Serene / Greta Gorsuch.

Description: Boston, MA : Gemma, 2020. | Series: Gemma Open Door

Identifiers: LCCN 2020015676 (print) | LCCN 2020015677 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936846863 (paperback) | ISBN 9781936846870 (epub)

Classification: LCC PS3607.O77 Q44 2020 (print) | LCC PS3607.O77 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015676

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015677

Cover by Laura Shaw Design

For Steve Brown

Gemma’s Open Doors provide fresh stories, new ideas, and essential resources for young people and adults as they embrace the power of reading and the written word.

Open Door

Chapter One

Wham! Wham! Down came the flyswatter. One buzzing black fly fell. Wham! Another fly fell. It lay on its back on the truck dashboard, kicking its little legs in the air. Using a paper napkin, Queen picked the thing up. She said to the fly, “On to your next adventure.” She put it in the little garbage bag she kept in the truck. She then took some cleaning spray and sprayed the dashboard. She got out another paper napkin and wiped everything up. That went into the garbage bag, too. By the end of the day, her little bag would be full.

Queen was having luck on the fly front. She hit whatever fly she aimed at with her blue plastic fly swatter. No flies escaped her. The problem was, there were always more flies. Perhaps it was because she drove a garbage truck.

Five days a week, Queen drove a City of Garnet Solid Waste Department truck from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. The name was long and fancy. But in the end, she worked for the city. And she drove a big, dirty white garbage truck. Needless to say, clouds of flies waited for Queen at every stop. Flies loved garbage dumpsters. Now, Queen had to keep her truck window open. This was to make sure she was in the right spot with the truck to pick up the dumpster. The truck had mechanical arms that reached out for the dumpster and then lifted it. Then the dumpster was turned upside down. The garbage fell out into the back of the truck. (This was the only thing Queen hated about her job. It smelled awful.) Then the mechanical arms put the dumpster back down. Queen had to turn around and watch out the truck window to make sure this process went as it should. And while Queen looked out the open window, more flies flew in. There was a never-ending supply of them.

Queen sighed. She swatted three more flies and cleaned them up with paper napkins. Then she went on to the next dumpster. Each city alley had seven dumpsters. Queen still had five more alleys to do today. It was 3:30 p.m.

Queen was also having good luck on the home front. Just the day before, she bought a small two-bedroom house in an old part of Garnet. She signed the papers, and the owner gave her the keys. Now Queen was the owner of a little West Texas house built in 1937. It was dusty blue with a black roof. The outside windows were dirty. The yard once had grass. Now it was just dirt. One or two trees held onto life, barely. No one had watered them in a long time. You really needed to water trees in West Texas. It didn’t rain much.

But the previous owner had done a lot of work on the inside of the house. There were new wood floors and creamy white walls. Everything was clean. The kitchen was completely new. The one bathroom had a new shower and sink. The owner wanted to rent out the house to college students. But then his girlfriend moved to Colorado for work. He wanted to go with her. So he needed to sell the house. Lucky her, thought Queen. She has a boyfriend who likes her so much, he wants to follow her to Colorado.

Best of all, Queen’s new home was across the street from her grandmother’s. Queen had visited her grandma there so often as a child that it was like home. Now, with Grandma Betty being eighty-seven, she needed help with day-to-day things. And Queen seemed to be the only one in the family helping out. None of Grandma Betty’s three daughters visited or did anything for her. They didn’t even call. One of them was Queen’s mother, Lila. Now, living so close to her grandma would make life easier for Queen. She could take over groceries, or drive Grandma Betty to the doctor.

Queen’s cell phone went “Ding!” It was her boss. The text said, “Get done and get back here.” Queen sighed. She was running late.

Chapter Two

Queen got back to the City of Garnet Solid Waste Department office just after 4:30 p.m. Vern, her boss, was waiting for her at the front door. The front door was wide open. That was strange. Usually it was kept shut, to keep the flies out. And because of the air conditioning. There was a white Garnet City Works truck parked in front. Queen didn’t know anyone from that department.

Vern Bustos, who could be very sharp indeed, always told his drivers: “Hey, the city knows we’re the most important! Imagine if we didn’t come to work for a few days. Peeuuuwww! Oh, the smell! The city would be getting a hundred calls a day.” Then he would make his voice high, and do a perfect little old Texas lady imitation: “Where’s my garbage collection? It stinks to high heaven behind my house. And my sister and her family are comin’ to visit from Houston.” Then Vern would finish: “So the very least the city can do is give us the best air conditioning in town.”

Queen and the other drivers had heard it a hundred times. They had Vern’s little speech memorized. But it was true. The office, which was really just a big barn, was always refrigerator cold. Queen even kept a sweater at work just to wear inside. This was saying a lot. Garnet got very, very hot. Wasn’t it in 2009 that they had one hundred days of over one hundred degrees? Good air conditioning was a gift.

Since it was July and 101 degrees today, Queen was surprised to see the office door standing wide open and her boss standing out in front. He had his arms crossed. And there was a big frown on his face. This was not good. What now? Queen thought. She couldn’t think of anything she had done. She took a deep breath. And then let it out slowly. Serene, serene, she thought. Quiet, peaceful, calm, serene.