Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,5

back.”

He shoved the bills in his pocket, pushed back the shock of hair on his forehead, slid around my door and was gone. I never even heard a car start up. The sump pump was thumping again. That always made it harder to hear Tommy’s getaway.

I’d made that seven dollars selling corn. For an eleven-year-old girl it felt like real money. I sat behind a card table by the road on late summer days, sometimes alone, usually with LaRhonda and Donald. It was boring, but it was something to do, although pretty much every day was like the day before. A car stopped, and a woman waved out the window. “How much?” she asked. Her hair was set in pin curls. She had a scarf over them, but the row right around her face wasn’t covered and the bobby pins sparked in the harsh August light.

“A nickel an ear,” I said. “Thirteen in a dozen.”

“I think they’re cheaper down the road,” the woman said, rubbing at her head. I don’t know why pin curls make your head itch, but they do.

“Then go down the road,” LaRhonda said under her breath. She had a mouth on her almost from the time she learned to talk.

Donald carried the paper bag to the car. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said. The woman handed him a dollar and said, “Keep the change.” I gave him a dime from the can, gave LaRhonda another, and put twenty cents in the breast pocket of my plaid cotton shirt.

The shirt had been Tommy’s. I got a lot of Tommy and Eddie’s clothes, which was made even worse because they were so much older than I was and so the clothes weren’t just boys’ clothes, they weren’t even fashionable boys’ clothes. That summer Donald wore a kind of collarless shirt with three buttons in front that I’d never seen before and that I was sure was fashionable, although that was about the last thing Donald cared about. His mother lived in a halfway decent-size city. His father was a shadowy figure. Donald spent a lot of time in Miller’s Valley. Visiting, he always called it, but he did it so often and so long that it practically counted as living there. I always felt a little lonesome, the times when he went back home, if that’s what it was.

“Dump that poor boy on his grandparents whenever she cares to,” I’d heard my mother say through the heating vent. “Her carrying on.” I hoped her carrying on wasn’t what it sounded like.

LaRhonda was wearing white patent leather shoes with a strap and a very slight heel with her pink shorts and shirt. Her white feet were rubbed red all around, her heels swaddled in Band-Aids over blisters. Most days she was limping by nightfall and her mother would want to soak her feet in Epsom salts and she would say, “Like somebody’s grandmother?” and limp off to bed. LaRhonda’s mother had been wheedled into buying those shoes for her Easter outfit, and LaRhonda took them off only when she put on her flowered shorty pajamas.

I wore Tommy’s old pajamas, too. The worst thing was, all the boys’ old clothes fit because I was narrow and sharp-shouldered, more or less built like a boy. I was a straight person, legs, nose, hair, everything long and narrow, up and down. I more or less always would be. When I got older the way I looked came into fashion, but by that time I was past caring. But when I was a kid wearing my brothers’ clothes the way I looked was a trial, as my aunt Ruth called things that bothered her. “I won’t listen to complaining about what’s on your back, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. “There’s too many fences need mending around here.” I remember first finding the expression “mending fences” in a book and being confused because I couldn’t think of it as anything but literal. Cows get antsy, or randy, or just stumble sideways, and a section of fence comes tumbling down, and they trudge out onto the road, and you have to fix the fence fast or more cows will follow, and maybe get hit by a truck driven by someone not paying attention. Happens all the time.

My father was a farmer, although I guess that’s not what the neighbors would tell you. They would have told you that Bud Miller fixed things for a living. A fix-it man, they used to call it, when things still