“Why certainly,” Don would say, never batting an eye, “just help yourself, Mrs. Corbin.” Then, because he knew what was coming and, as became a man of the world, must be discreet, he turned back to the sugar barrel and tossed off a few more two-pound bags, in readiness for the next customers who asked for them.
Mrs. Corbin stepped to the wall telephone with the goose neck a few feet away, picked up the phone book that hung from a cord beside it, and opening the directory to somewhere in the middle, she would peer intently at the long list of names there and run an inquiring finger slowly down the page. “Mrs... Mrs... Mrs... Mrs...” she would murmur, just loud enough for him to hear, and then give Central the number in lowered tones that could not be heard at all. Don smiled to himself. He knew what the number was — 424, Hersey’s saloon; and Mrs. Corbin was calling up Mr. Hersey to find out when he was to be free and where she was to pick him up this time, before they drove out to the pines after supper to park for awhile after dark. He knew this because Mr. Heffelfinger had told him, with a hearty laugh, that that’s what was going on; and now, after so many afternoons of “Mrs... Mrs... Mrs... Mrs...” he could see it for himself. He was entranced. He would love to have told his father and mother, but of course they would only have said he was taking a great deal for granted, smarty, a very great deal indeed, and had a dirty mind besides. Instead, he told three or four of his friends in High School, and together they laughed and laughed.
Within a few weeks after he had started at the Arcadia Grocery, Mr. Heffelfinger suddenly changed Don’s dinner hour on Saturday noon. At first, he had gone home to dinner at eleven-thirty when Mr. Kunkel did, returning at twelve-thirty to relieve Mr. Heffelfinger and Jake, the other assistant. Now, for a reason that wasn’t at once clear to Don, Mr. Heffelfinger asked him to switch places with Jake, and Jake went home for dinner at the same time as Mr. Kunkel. This left Mr. Heffelfinger and Don alone together during the noon hour, a time of day when hardly anybody ever came into the store at all. But one of these few was Miss Bye, who invariably arrived a few minutes after Jake and Mr. Kunkel had gone home.
Miss Bye was a very short, very fat woman of maybe fifty, with hair dyed a lifeless jet-black like a wig, and puffy cheeks coated with talcum powder so thick that she looked as if she had just recovered from having her face stuck in the flour barrel in the back room. She wore a single large pearl on each ear lobe, and her pudgy hands glittered with rings. In her shiny silk dress of a changeable coppery color, she swelled outward in front like a pouter pigeon and in back like a lawn roller, and she had been stuffed so tightly into her irridescent dress that she looked like a gorgeous pincushion.
“Ahhh, Miss Bye,” Mr. Heffelfinger would say, surprised; and after the barest word or two about the weather, he would draw his order pad from the pocket of his cotton apron-gown and remove the indelible pencil from behind his ear. “And what will it be today, Miss Bye?” It was always a nice piece of salt pork, not too fat and not too lean, or a quart of molasses, or some sour pickles or new potatoes — something, at any rate, that would take them down to the cellar.
Mr. Heffelfinger was very fat himself, and fiftyish, too; but he was a nice man, a really kind man, and Don was fond of him. He had silver-gray hair and small, merry, blue eyes, and until Don got onto the situation between him and Miss Bye, he had always thought of Mr. Heffelfinger as a kind of ideal father, except that his own father, so stern but so good, was better. But he was not in the least shocked or even dismayed. With his newfound sophistication he shrugged and smiled to himself, and thought: Well, that’s the way of the world, there’s marriage for you all right all right... And wisely, as Mr. Heffelfinger expected him to do, he pretended to notice nothing. The presence of Jake, it seemed, had proved inconvenient.
But all the same, there was occasionally an awkward moment, a moment that Don retailed hilariously at school on Monday morning. When, as sometimes happened, a customer came in during the noon hour and innocently asked for a piece of salt pork or a pint of pickles, all the resources of Don’s ripening experience had to be brought into play. As he approached the stairs that led down to the cellar, he began to whistle Over There or Keep the Home Tires Burning or something else that he could whistle equally loud; and as he reached the bottom step he would even burst into song. A second or two later he came upon Mr. Heffelfinger and Miss Bye, standing, a careful couple of feet apart, beside the molasses barrel or the potato bin; — under the harsh glare of the single electric bulb Mr. Heffelfinger’s round face was purple as an eggplant, his forehead streamed with sweat, and Miss Bye’s lustrous billowing bosom pantingly rose and fell. Mr. Heffelfinger bent forward slightly from the waist, all attention and business, the order pad held in his raised palm with the indelible pencil poised above it, while he murmured: “And perhaps, Miss Bye, I might also suggest some Bermuda onions? We have some beauties, just in the other day...” Don walked by acutely self-conscious, his eyes straight ahead; but on the way back upstairs he was already grinning, and he thought gleefully to himself: Boy! won’t Ernie and Eddie and Harry love this!...
So life at the Arcadia Grocery went on, wonderful as ever. Besides giving him the chance of being in on the exciting events of the adult world, it had other delights, of course. Don loved to amaze a customer with his lightning calculation of the cost of 6½ pounds of bananas, for instance, at 8½ cents a pound, a customer, that is, who didn’t know that this total was simultaneously registered, along with the weight, on the reverse side of the horizontal cylinder above the scales. During an idle moment he loved to stand in the front window looking through the spray of the tiny fountain that squealed faintly like a distant peanut wagon and kept the lettuce and spinach fresh, and wave to friends who went by on Main Street. Every time he passed the cold meat counter he gave the handle of the slice a spin and helped himself to a fresh slice of boiled ham or dried beef. When a customer asked if the cheese was strong today, he cut off a small piece with the tremendous cleaverlike knife, sampled it himself, then pronounced the verdict with authority. And he early loved the long, democratic Saturday evenings when the store filled up with farmers and their families, loud with greetings and news as if they hadn’t laid eyes on one another for months, chattering away in their Holland-Dutch accents and generously accepting him as one of themselves.
Meanwhile Mrs. Corbin continued to run her finger down the open page of the telephone book in the afternoon and murmur aloud, “Mrs... Mrs... Mrs... Mrs...” Mr. Heffelfinger and Miss Bye continued to go down cellar on Saturday noon and inspect the salt pork together; Mrs. Hanks continued to climb the stairs to Dr. Wallace’s office above the store on Saturday nights after office hours were long since over and Mr. Hadley continued not too surreptitiously to pay Mrs. Denton’s exorbitant grocery bills and the good-looking Mrs. Burton Slade, emerging from the store, continued to be picked up at the curb with not at all surprising frequency by Mr. Cunningham or his well-paid chauffeur Art Holmes, who, by the greatest good fortune for the package-laden Mrs. Slade, just happened to be passing by at that very moment; items, all, to be relished and hooted over with Harry and Eddie and Ernie...