Spitting Image by Shutta Crum

Author:Shutta Crum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

twenty

THE NEXT FEW DAYS flew by as I worked hard to earn the rest of the money Lester usually paid me twenty cents a day to help out at the store while he or Mama was at lunch or running an errand. Sometimes I rang customers up. Sometimes I helped stock the shelves. It was also my job to count all the postage stamps when they came in. At twenty cents a day I figured out that I only had to work twenty-two days to have $4.40. That’d be it! I wouldn’t have to ask the Ol’ Biddy, and I’d even have a few cents left over. School started in about five weeks, so the timing couldn’t have been better.

One afternoon I was watching the store and baby-sitting Baby at the same time while Robert helped Beryl Ann with some canning. Baby was behind the counter by me, sitting on an upturned lard bucket and playing with a little garter snake he’d found out behind the store. If he wasn’t hungry and didn’t wander off, Baby Blue usually wasn’t too hard to baby-sit.

Anyway, who should walk into the Gas & Go that day but Dickie and his daddy and a couple of Dickie’s no-account friends from school, Bobby DeLong and Cy Meeks.

I clamped my teeth together, smiled, and determined to be as friendly and professional as possible, just like Lester.

“May I help you?” I asked.

“Whoa!” Bobby whistled. “Look who’s here.”

“It’s Baby Ree-tard and your girlfriend, Dickie,” Cy added.

I just couldn’t find it in me to even get to the count of three. I started around the counter, but Dickie cut me off. “Shut up, you two,” he grumbled.

“Isn’t she the one that split your lip?” Bobby asked.

Mr. Whitten had gone right over to the automotive supplies, but now he turned back. “What’s that?” he asked. Holding a can of motor oil, he walked back toward the counter. “I thought you fell off your bike. Your mama never told me no different.”

Dickie’s friends suddenly got quiet and awfully interested in the Joy bread sitting on the shelf nearby. “Aw, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” mumbled Dickie.

“Speak up, boy! I’m talking to you,” ordered Dickie’s father, setting the oil down on the counter in front of me. “What’s this about your split lip?”

“They got it all wrong,” said Dickie, a bit louder.

“Do they now?” Mr. Whitten asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, why don’t you straighten it out for me.” Mr. Whitten crossed his arms and leaned against the counter, like he had all the time in the world. I could see a dark purple vein in the side of his neck jumping and throbbing. And I could tell that Dickie was squirming in his shoes.

One part of me was pleased to see Dickie getting what was due him. It served him right for being so mean all the time. But another part of me remembered what Adam had said about not wishing Mr. Whitten on any child as a father. And I

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