Free Adverbs by Daniel Handler Page A

arguing with the guy. His name tag said Thomas but he’d crossed out the H in ink. Behind him I could see what he brought to work: a cup of coffee and a tattered black sketchbook, and he smoked, and on a grimy counter was a TV with its back to me. I heard the dim sound of a crowd. He was watching the game.
    “I’m telling you I can’t tell you, like I said,” he told Overalls.
    “How can I get back to the city if there’s no ferry tonight?” she said. “I’m a florist. I have flowers in the back.”
    There was a loud, loud horn blast, and we all turned around to see who was there. First in the line at the booth, its bumper growling at the roadblock, was a station wagon, but through the windows all I could see were stacks and stacks of newspapers, yellowing now and yellowing more with every passing moment.Couldn’t anybody do anything right? “There must be a way,” I said.
    “That’s what I keep saying,” said the other woman. “If the ferry’s broken there are other boats, like a charter.”
    “Only if you have a lot of money,” the guy said, “and maybe not then. Look, I don’t know anything.” There was another roar above us and we looked up and waited. “They told me to let no one through and that there’d be more information on the radio. Will you please go back and sit in your car.”
    “I have a friend,” I said, “who will have an operation tonight.”
    Even the other woman looked at me funny. “I’ve heard every emergency,” the guy said. “Every single person in this traffic is urgent.”
    The TV squawked and the guy looked. “These guys are really taking a beating!” an announcer said. He sounded more panicked than usual, maybe. “I’ve never seen this kind of thing from the Magpies!”
    “Shit!” the guy said, and waved us back. “Please, ladies, it’s an emergency catastrophe. Go back and sit down and soon we’ll all know.”
    “You could at least tell us something helpful,” said the overalls woman, and looked at me to see if I was on her team. I shook my head and walked back, the liquor fading with every step. Again there was the roar above me, but why notice the thunder when it only turns out to be rain? There wasn’t anything helpful to tell us. It was raining and it was going to rain. Everybody was honking so loudly I had to get back in the passenger seat to tellLila I didn’t know, but she’d ejected the album and was fiddling with my radio which was almost always not working much.
    “Tell me something,” she said, and winced toward her belly. She undid the seat belt, took a deep breath, and faced me. “There’s no football team called the Magpies, is there?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s the Eagles and some Orioles, I think. And the Anti-Semites. I don’t know.”
    Lila winced again and then looked out the wet window. “Because the radio said something.”
    “Holy motherfucking shit!” the radio said suddenly, and then disappeared into a depth of static.
    “I think something is happening,” Lila said. She gave me a grim smile I hadn’t seen in months, a smile of trying to be brave. “I don’t think I’m going to make it. What did the guy say?”
    “He didn’t know,” I said, “but he couldn’t spell his own name, either.”
    “No one can spell my name,” Lila said, “and it’s a four-letter word. Don’t leave again. With all this traffic you’ll never find out. It’ll never stop and I don’t want to sit here without you.”
    She opened her door briefly to the loud of the rain and the cars and she spat onto the ground, a white glob of her bite of cake. “It’s the end!” the radio shouted again, and I turned it off and reached across her to shut the door, so at least we could be quieter, a little. Emergency or football I wasn’t sure, and Lila didn’t seem up for either.
    “They said this was my only chance,” Lila said quietly. In the lounge maybe it was worth it, to sit free at Point No Point rather than linger