Free The Pink Hotel by Patrick Dennis & Dorothy Erskine

chocolate ice cream with marshmallow dope.
    She wondered where Darlene was now. The last Mary had heard of her, she’d been in Las Vegas. Mary felt a grudging admiration for Darlene. Darlene hadn’t stayed in Florida very long. Even if she had started it. She and Darlene had been best friends since they had been in the fourth grade. (There had been a lot of talk, even then, about Darlene and the Bittner boys but Mary hadn’t believed a word of it.) They had stayed friends, too, even after they graduated from High and Darlene went to work in the A. C. Brown Shoe Factory, while Mary went on to business college.
    The big, double room at the Baldwins’ hadn’t been lonely with Darlene in it even some of the time. Her perfume, her talcum, her bath salts, her dresses, even her dirty underwear, her stockings on the towel rack, were sentient parts without her, alive with Darlene.
    Darlene had talked Florida up for maybe as long as a year before she had been able to get Mary to agree to go, telling Mary how they would go down by bus and stop off a lot of different places, see the country. They could go swimming in the ocean every day, lie around on the beach. Orange juice and sun tan and rich husbands would be marvelously theirs. Dad hadn’t wanted her to go. He’d said that she was tooyoung, that she’d never been any farther away from home than St. Louis and Chicago, that the world was an evil place. Mary didn’t suppose that she’d ever have had nerve enough to do it if it hadn’t been for phrenology. Mother believed in it. She was always looking for marital bumps on the fellows who came to see Mary, kept going on about it even at breakfast.
    Mary’s mother hadn’t been able to find a marital bump on any of the boys Mary went around with except Ronald Kohler, and even Mary’s mother hadn’t liked Ronald. It had used to make Mary so darned embarrassed when her mother started maneuvering around a new boy until she’d had a good look at the back of his head.
    Her mother meant well, she knew that. Mother only wanted Mary to get a good husband, a nice steady fellow like Dad, but it had made Mary feel like such a darned fool to have mother gauging a new man’s intentions before he even had time to hand her his hat, Mr. Purcell’s marital bump, now, was pretty well developed, but Mr. Wenton didn’t seem to have any. She giggled. Mother would have loved Mr. Purcell. . . .
     
    She and Darlene had arrived in Miami on Friday, just before the hurricane. It was raining quite a lot and the sky had been a funny color, like hot lead. “You don’t want to go to no beach hotel today, girls,” the cab driver said. “I’ll take you to the Seminole. It’s been there a long time.”
    Darlene had said that there was no point in getting a room. They’d clean up in the Ladies, check their bags and have something to eat, drop into the bar for a beer.
    It had all been sort of fun, at first, but it kept getting darker and darker and the rain came down like nothing she’d ever seen before and the wind howled and there seemed to be more and more people around, looking worried, and out in the wet night she could hear things crashing and breaking. It was just palm branches and glass and street signs and fancy store fronts, but she hadn’t known that then.
    Darlene made friends a lot quicker than Mary did. Darlene had been talking to a couple of Cubans, and then somehowthe Cubans had been buying them a drink, and then after-while they had all gone up to somebody’s room for a drink and the one Cuban had flashed his teeth and sort of grabbed at Darlene saying, “You wear size fourteen, Yes? You are be-au-di-ful, No?”
    Then Darlene had seemed to disappear into an adjoining room, and the other Cuban—his name was Mr, Santos—had made Mary a Rum Collins and they had talked about bananas for a while until he, too, had started flashing his teeth and saying that she was be-au-di-ful, No?
    Mary knocked at the door that Darlene had