and Ma decided to bake him a cake.
There wasn’t
money enough for anything like a real present.
Ma sent me to fetch the extras
with fifty cents she’d been hiding away.
“Don’t go to Joyce City, Billie,” she said.
“You can get what we need down Hardly’s store.”
I slipped the coins into my sweater pocket, the
pocket without the hole,
thinking about how many sheets of new music
fifty cents would buy.
Mr. Hardly glared
when the Wonder Bread door
banged shut behind me.
He squinted as I creaked across the wooden floor.
Mr. Hardly was in the habit
of charging too much for his stale food,
and he made bad change when he thought
he could get away with it.
I squinted back at him as I gave him Ma’s order.
Mr. Hardly’s
been worse than normal
since his attic filled with dust
and collapsed under the weight.
He hired folks for the repairs,
and argued over every nail and every
little minute.
The whole place took
shoveling for days before he could
open again and
some stock was so bad it
had to be thrown away.
The stove clanked in the corner
as Mr. Hardly filled Ma’s order.
I could smell apples,
ground coffee, and peppermint.
I sorted through the patterns on the feed bags,
sneezed dust,
blew my nose.
When Mr. Hardly finished sacking my things,
I paid the bill,
and tucking the list in my pocket along with the
change,
hurried home,
so Ma could bake the cake before Daddy came in.
But after Ma emptied the sack,
setting each packet out on the
oilcloth, she counted her change
and I remembered with a sinking feeling
that I hadn’t kept an eye on
Mr. Hardly’s money handling,
and Mr. Hardly had cheated again.
Only this time he’d cheated himself, giving us
four cents extra.
So while Ma mixed a cake,
I walked back to Mr. Hardly’s store,
back through the dust,
back through the Wonder Bread door,
and thinking about the secondhand music
in a moldy box at the shop in Joyce City,
music I could have for two cents a sheet,
I placed Mr. Hardly’s overpayment on the counter
and turned to head back home.
Mr. Hardly cleared his throat and
I wondered for a moment
if he’d call me back to offer a piece of peppermint
or pick me out an apple from the crate,
but he didn’t,
and that’s okay.
Ma would have thrown a fit
if I’d taken a gift from him.
February 1934