Adverbs by Daniel Handler Page B

a rare commodity, and some might say she should leave him alone. But she’d been left alone too long, and who are those people anyway, bickering in the corner and saying such things? Love like this, it was better than sitting in a diner doing nothing, because look what has arrived for Andrea! A man who will treat her badly! Tony!
    “Are you open?” Tony said. “I can’t tell.”
    “We’re always open,” Andy said. “Any diner worth its salt is open twenty-four hours a day.”
    “I’m in the mood for a drink,” Tony said.
    Andrea twirled all the way around on her stool, as the diner was the sort of place where that could be done. She was not going to see the Snow Queen today, not again, but in the meantime here was something who could help her through three to five minutes. “I recommend the Suffering Bastard,” she said. “It’s four parts gin, three parts brandy, one part lime juice, sugar syrup, Angostura bitters, ginger ale, and it’s garnished with a slice of cucumber.”
    “Sounds good to me,” Tony said. “Somebody give us two ofthose.” He would treat her badly, but in the meantime love like this was better. Better something poured over ice, than just the ice outside in a heap by itself.
    “We don’t serve party drinks like that,” Andy said. “This is a diner, and even if we did I wouldn’t serve you two that. I’ve seen a miracle today, and I want to see more of them, so I’m spending the rest of the evening scraping the paint off these windows of mine. I’d make the cook make you a drink, I guess, if we had such things.”
    “Idaho,” said the cook, lost again to us, but nobody heard him because Andy had already started scraping. The scraping was such a horrible sound that the woman in the corner looked up and for the first time realized that she was in this story too, not just the one where she bickered with her ghost of a boyfriend.
    “No need,” Tony said. “Let’s get out of here and go to a bar. You ever been to the Black Elephant, Andrea?”
    “See you later, Andy,” Andrea said.
    “You owe me like twenty-six dollars for all those half carafes,” he said, over the scraping.
    “She’ll pay you later,” Tony said, and they walked out together like they were going to a masked ball. Out in front of Andy’s was the frozen figure of a man with his hat on, his face icy in the middle of some terrible speech. Toppled, he looked like one of the victims of Pompeii, a city destroyed in a volcano studied by Mike in his classroom a while ago, although now, in the Snow Queen’s apartment, Mike was reciting the three common words, beginning with the letter A, often used to describe magpies. Magpies are artful and aggressive birds who are oftenattracted to shiny things, which is maybe why Tony turned from the dull gray-white of the man on the sidewalk to the brightening shine of Andrea’s pretty eyes.
    “Who’s that?” Tony said, shrugging to the guy.
    “Looks like an ex-boyfriend to me,” Andrea said.
    “Somebody treated him cold,” Tony said. Although there was plenty of rain, there was no more sunlight on the street, which meant this lousy day was pretty much over, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean that’s what was happening to them.
    “Happens all the time,” Andrea said. “It’s not the end of the world.”

collectively
    S altwater taffy is I guess made from salt water and a whole bunch of sugar, spun or woven or beaten into a substance they sell down by the boardwalk. If you’re in San Francisco, as this love story is, you can head south and see it being made in a shack, next to the shack where they sell tickets and next to the shack where they fry up calamari and give it to you for a price. Just follow the signs. You can’t miss the signs they put up.
    This is love, saltwater taffy. Pretty much everybody has had some. Somebody offers it on a day when you have nothing to do, and most likely you’ll take it and put it in your mouth. It unites us,