Autumn Street by Lois Lowry Page A

hands didn't move. His mouth fell open and made shapes but no sounds came. He looked at me. I remembered him walking, in his crisp white suit, carrying his cane, on Autumn Street, and was sad.
    "I'll do it for you," I whispered, and took his hand gently. I put his forefinger into my own mouth, and tasted his clean, aged skin. Carefully I sprinkled cinnamon on his damp fingertip and lifted it to the wet black shape that had once been his fine proud mouth. It touched his tongue, and with his mouth he shaped what I understood to be a smile. I dried his finger with the hem of my dress, put his hand back into his lap, and crept away. Grandmother never knew.

12
    L ILLIAN C HESTNUT HAD boyfriends who were soldiers. Sometimes Jess and I watched when she came down from her over-the-garage bedroom in the early evenings, dressed in full gathered skirts and off-the-shoulder blouses, and went out the back door to be met at the corner by soldiers who arrived in a rattletrap car.
    When I called Daddy a soldier once, Mama corrected me.
    "Your father's an officer," she said.
    "But he's in the army. People in the army are soldiers. And people in the navy are sailors." I had learned that much, I thought, from
Life
magazine.
    "Some of them are. But there are also officers, and your father is an officer."
    "What's the difference?"
    Mama sighed. "Oh, Liz, it's very complicated."
    That meant that she wasn't going to explain it to me.
    Even with my memory of Daddy vague and distant, I could tell that Lillian's boyfriends were different. They came from the army base just outside of town, and were young and noisy, with cigarettes attached to the corners of their mouths. Lillian always looked nervously over her shoulder toward the house as she went out to their car; we could hear her say, "Will you guys
hush?
" with suppressed laughter in her voice before they drove away.
    By early evening Grandmother was always upstairs, on the other side of the house, spooning soup into Grandfather, or reading Dickens aloud. Mama would be in her own room, preparing the baby for bed and listening to the evening news on a small radio. The evenings of Chinese Checkers and firelight were over.
    "That Lillian," Tatie said to Jess and me after we had watched one evening's leave-taking from the back porch, "she gonna get in trouble, goin' with soldiers."
    Getting into trouble was old hat with me. "Maybe,"
I acknowledged enviously. "But she's old enough. She can't get punished."
    "Ha. Her kind of trouble carry its own punishment."
    From the time I had deliberately rubbed poison ivy on myself, I knew that there were kinds of behavior that carried their own punishments, but it was hard to relate that experience to Lillian driving off every evening with loud-voiced soldiers.
    "Well," I said, affecting worldliness, "at least she won't get all swollen up and feeling horrible."
    "Ha," said Tatie, putting the last of the dinner dishes away.
    ***
    One evening Charles was there. He and I sat on the back steps before bedtime, counting the fireflies in the yard, slapping at the mosquitoes, planning what we would do in the morning. Lillian appeared with her hair freshly curled and her waist cinched in by a wide red belt. She lit a cigarette and sat with us on the steps, watching the road for the car full of soldiers.
    "Lillian," I asked her, "what happened to that one soldier who used to come, the one with red hair who called you 'Roasted Chestnut'?"
    Lillian laughed and took a long drag on her cigarette. The smoke appeared in two streams from her nose, like a horse breathing in winter.
    "Red? He's gone. He's fighting the damn Germans."
    "I thought the war was against the Japanese. My father's fighting the Japanese."
    Charles groaned. "Elizabeth Jane, you so
stupid.
"
    Lillian aimed a smoke ring at me so that I could poke my finger through it. Then she did one for Charles.
    "It's against the Japanese
and
the Germans. Some of the guys go one place, some go another."
    "Which is