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Margaret frowned and I continued.
“Dema lives there, in that place next to Old Lady Rogers. She’s our age. Got more freckles than Carter has pills.
And her brothers are twins! Can’t tell ’em apart. They even have the same halitosis. One’s Harvey. The other’s
Harlan. They all go to Catholic school.”
“Who lives there?” She pointed down the next block to the house with the trellis out front. “That one with the
new car in the driveway. Looks like the kind of car my daddy used to make.”
“Oh, that’s the Berns. Tommy is in John B.’s class. He’s a big, ugly cuss. Got a big mole on his face with hairs
sticking out of it. But his daddy owns the drugstore, and you can get a piece of candy for nothing there if you
smile real nice.”
On the afternoon we met Margaret’s big sister, Reno, for the first time, she offered to take us all swimming. I
was surprised when Mama let little Sue-Sue go along. Even though Reno was sixteen, she acted more like an
Atlantic City bathing beauty than a baby-sitter. She was obviously all grown up, and proud of it. That nursery
she was toting around under her swimsuit filled it to stretching. Right from the get-go, Reno gave the neighbor
ladies plenty to cluck about.
At the river, she attracted the attention of some older boys and they went off to swim above the dam, leaving us kids in the shallows below. We watched as they swam out to the island and didn’t come back. John B. had to stick near the shore after that to watch Sue-Sue.
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(c) 2010 Douglas Armstrong
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