Free The Stand (Original Edition) by Stephen King

wintergreen Life Savers from her dress pocket. “I’m a lot more than twenty-one. And I feel it. Want one?” He shook his head at the Life Saver she had thumbed up. She popped it into her own mouth instead.
    “You’re just a girl yet,” he said with a touch of his old bantering flattery. She had always liked it, but now it only brought a ghost of a smile to her lips. “Any new men in your life?”
    “Several,” she said. “How bout you?”
    “No,” he said seriously. “No new men. Some girls, but no new men.”
    He had hoped for laughter, but only got the ghost smile again. I’m troubling her, he thought. That’s what it is. She doesn’t know what I want here. She hasn’t been waiting for three years for me to show up after all. She only wanted me to stay lost.
    “Same old Larry,” she said. “Never serious. You’re not engaged? Seeing anyone steadily?”
    “I play the field, Mom.”
    “You always did. At least you never came home to tell me you’d got some nice Catholic girl in a family way. I’ll give you that. You were either very careful, very lucky, or very polite.”
    He strove to keep a poker face. It was the first time in his life that she had ever mentioned sex to him, directly or obliquely.
    “Anyway, you’re gonna learn,” Alice said. “They say bachelors have all the fun. Not so. You just get old and full of sand, nasty, the way that Mr. Freeman is. He’s got that sidewalk-level apartment and he’s always standing there in the window, hoping for a strong breeze.”
    Larry grunted.
    “I hear that song you got on the radio. I tell people, that’s my son. That’s Larry. Most of them don’t believe it.”
    “You’ve heard it?” He wondered why she hadn’t mentioned it first. “Sure, all the time on that rock n roll station the young girls listen to. WABC.”
    “Do you like it?”
    “As well as I like any of that music.” She looked at him firmly. “I think some of it sounds suggestive. Lewd.”
    He found himself shuffling his feet and forced himself to stop. “It’s just supposed to sound . . . passionate, Mom. That’s all.” His face suffused with blood. He had never expected to be sitting in his mother’s kitchen, discussing passion.
    “The place for passion’s the bedroom,” she said curtly, closing off any aesthetic discussion of his hit record. “Also, you did something to your voice. You sound like a nigger.”
    “Now?” he asked, amused.
    “No, on the radio.”
    “That brown sound, it sho do get aroun,” Larry said, smiling. “Just like that,” she said, nodding. “When I was a girl, we thought Frank Sinatra was daring. Now they have this disco. Disco, they call it. Screaming, I call it.” She looked at him grudgingly. “At least there’s no screaming on your record.”
    “I get a royalty,” he said. “A certain per cent of every record sold. It breaks down to—”
    “Oh, go on,” she said, and made a shooing gesture with her hand. “I flunked all my maths. Have they paid you yet, or did you get that little car on credit?”
    “They haven’t paid me much,” he said, skating up to the edge of the lie but not quite over it. “I made a down payment on the car. I’m financing the rest.”
    “Easy credit terms,” she said balefully. “That’s how your father ended up a bankrupt. The doctor said he died of a heart attack, but it wasn’t that. It was a broken heart. Your dad went to the poor-house on easy credit terms.”
    This was an old rap, and Larry just let it flow over him, nodding at the right places. His father had owned a haberdashery. A Robert Hall had opened not far away, and a year later his business had failed. He had turned to food for solace, putting on 110 pounds in three years. He had dropped dead in the corner luncheonette when Larry was nine, a half-finished meatball sandwich on his plate in front of him. Then
    Alice brought Larry up, dominating his life with her proverbs and prejudices until he left home. Her last