Yellow Mesquite by John J. Asher Page A

kids…”
    Aunt Grace stopped fanning. “Little kid? No, no. She’s sixteen.”
    Harley stared.
    “You thought…” Aunt Grace paused, amused.  
    “I thought you meant little, like a little kid,” he said.  
    “No, no. Sherylynne is sixteen, going on seventeen. I thought she might feel more at home…well, if someone near her own age…that you might accompany us to the Cotton Bowl. A little welcome for Sherylynne.”
    “Uh, well, uh…” He couldn’t think of a single reason not to go with Aunt Grace and this Sherylynne to hear Billy Graham, not one thing that wasn’t an obvious excuse. “Uh, sure,” he mumbled. “I guess so.”  
    “She’s a charming girl who has had very little opportunity.” Aunt Grace fixed him with her steely squint. “It’s harder for girls, don’t you think?”  
    “Yes, ma’am. I guess so. She gonna go to school here?”
    Aunt Grace averted her eyes and stood up, her old stern self again. “If you’re finished, we’d better call it a night.” Harley took his dishes into the kitchen. “Leave them in the sink,” Aunt Grace said. “Mattie will take care of them in the morning.”  
    “Thank you. That was good.”
    “Good night.” Aunt Grace switched off the parlor lights.
    He went upstairs. Why in hell was he thanking Aunt Grace? He’d been had. Snookered with a piece of pie and a glass of milk.

Chapter 9
    Rebound

    I T RAINED ALL day and they played penny-ante poker under the tarp on back of the sand truck. By five o’clock, when Berry let Harley out at the corner and Harley paid him for the week’s rides, the rain had stopped, the sun low and dim in a gray sky.  
    Harley took a clean change of clothes to the shower. Afterward, he lay across his bed and read a few pages from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil , one of the books Sidney had assigned him. He bought his books at a used bookstore near Southern Methodist University.
    Aunt Grace’s two dining tables were long, men at one, women at the other. These meals with all the boarders lined up at the tables reminded Harley of cattle lined up at feed troughs. The men were mostly middle-aged. Men in boardinghouses, he had concluded, were either on their way up, or on their way down, mostly down. Attempts at cheerfulness and the occasional laughter were undermined by a mood of melancholy: the inability of men and women to give or receive comfort for the secret tragedies of their lives. They made attempts, smiled and indulged in self-conscious conversation, but mostly each nursed his or her failures and defeats privately. The only other man near Harley’s age was a mildly retarded boy who delivered prescriptions for a drugstore. Harley learned there had been another “kid,” a crop-duster who killed himself flying under a power line. Harley had his old room.  
    When everyone was seated, Aunt Grace took her place at the head of the women’s table near the kitchen. She bowed her head and everyone went silent. “Lord, thank you for bringing us together again in good health. Bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and forgive us our sins. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.” Immediately there was a rush of activity, murmuring voices and creaking chairs as bodies reached and stretched and adjusted, a clinking and clanking of dishes and flatware as platters were hoisted and food was spooned and speared. Occasionally someone would try to help the retarded boy, but he’d get upset, so mostly they let him be his independent self and make a mess.  
    Harley often missed the evening meal altogether. Tonight he had hoped for a preview of Aunt Grace’s niece, but she was a no-show. Finally Aunt Grace and Mattie picked up dirty dinner plates and served the pie on saucers. The slices were noticeably smaller than what he’d been bribed with the night before.
    Aunt Grace took his plate up and set a sliver of pie in its place.  
    “Be down at seven,” she commanded in an aside.
    He wondered what she would do if he