I ran behind the counter to where Mr. Williams kept the bandages in a box and got out one and pressed it to my cheek over the thin little scratches her nails made. My face was burning. I felt my eyes pounding against the lids like they wanted to get out, and my hair felt like wool that I wanted to tear off to cool myself.
When I got my mind steady, I began to think about what had happened. Sitting on the high stool behind the counter, I looked around the store and out onto the bright street. I wondered where Jo Lynne was, if she was home. Then I thought of myself and how dumb I was. I'd made a fool out of myself the night we went out, and it didn't even matter to her. The night up in the new houses didn't matter. Kissing her didn't matter either. She didn't know what I thought when I saw the moon on her face, or when my arm touched hers in the movie, or even when I heard her walk into the drugstore a little while before. She didn't know she was the only thing I ever wanted to have that I thought I'd get.
I took the bandage off and looked at the red lines on my cheek. They made a sort of tit-tat-toe pattern like we used to make on the blackboard at school when I was little. I felt ashamed when I looked at it. Someone hitting me. I never did anything to make anyone hit me, except for Bruce before I went to school. I wondered what people would think if they knew someone hit me, especially a girl. They'd think all kinds of dirty things like people always did. Or maybe they'd be surprised, too, because they thought I was just a quiet boy who worked at the drugstore and lived with my aunt and my mother up on the hill in an old house, and sat up there with my mother every night and took care of her and listened to the radio with her.
I went and looked in the mirror again. There were two dark red lines on my cheek right above where I shaved. The blood had stopped flowing now, so I knew that was what they were going to look like for the rest of today, anyway. Then I tried to think of some kind of excuse to give the people who might see me, but I couldn't think of anything that sounded like you could believe it. I didn't care, either.
Mr. Williams kept some matches behind the counter, so I took one and lit the bandage and threw it in the trash basket. I watched the smoke curl up, gray and fast at first, then white and slow. When it stopped, I began to smell the burnt smell. I breathed it in and sat up on the stool and didn't think about anything. My mind was empty.
Work in the drugstore went on like always. Mr. Williams had the old front torn off and put all glass in the place where the old bricks were. That made business pick up some, just like he said it would. I don't guess he ever thought of what it would be like in the store when the sun was going down and it was shining right in through all that glass. That was the time the store got all orange inside, and it hurt your eyes to look at almost anything. Then he had to spend a lot more money buying shades, and that messed up the way it was supposed to look.
Around this time Aunt Mae began to change. She had always been nice to me, but she was even better now. I never told her about what happened with Jo Lynne, so she didn't have to feel sorry for me, but it seemed to me that she did, and I wondered why.
Thinking people feel sorry for you is something I guess you should appreciate, but I didn't and never have. It made me mad to see someone acting like I was pitiful, always asking how I was, fixing special things for me, talking to me in a sort of baby way, making her eyes all sorry-looking when she looked at me. I wanted to tell Aunt Mae she got me mad, and I wanted to ask her why she treated me in such a different way, but somehow or another, I never did. I just stayed curious and waited to see what was making her act like I was a crippled little mountain rabbit that hadn't had anything to eat for a week.
Sometimes when I went home at night I just went up to the old room where my train was. I could open the window up there and prop it up with a broom pole and look out at the stars and the pine tips. I could feel the breeze blowing into the room, stirring the dust off everything and pushing the old, stale air around. Aunt Mae wasn't around to pat me on the head and feed me the special things she made and look at me with that look that made me mad. I could think up there too.
I could think about plenty things. Everybody who left grade school with me was at the state university now, at least all who went to high school, and most did. People who came into the drugstore always talked about them, what a good time they were having, how some were in fraternities and sororities if they had money, how this one was studying to be a doctor or something else you had to go to college to be. I thought of what I was ever going to be. I couldn't stay at the drugstore all my life, and there wasn't much else I could do in the valley. You had to go to college to be anything. But I didn't even get near high school, and almost everybody got that far.
I thought about Jo Lynne too. I didn't like to think about it, but I did. The night I went out with her was the best time I had since I was in school or during the war at the propeller factory party. When I thought of the day in the drugstore, my face got hot and my eyes began to pound again. I could feel my heart beat all over my body. That was a day I wanted never to remember, but every time I got up in the room and let my mind go over things, it came back to me as clear as if I was right there getting hit.
Maybe I could have told Aunt Mae about Jo Lynne. It was the way she was acting to me that made me not tell her. If Aunt Mae had been like she was before, I would have told her, but I didn't want her to know about it, not anything about it. I was tired enough of what she was doing now, and I didn't want her to get worse when I told her how I missed Jo Lynne and wished I could write her and try to make some excuses and say I was sorry about what I had said and done and ask her to write me a letter back, even if she was still mad, just as long as I got something from her that I could see her writing on. I wanted to go by her grandfather's and get the place where she lived, but I never could do it. Maybe if I would have talked to Aunt Mae she would have told me the right thing to do, but I didn't want to talk to her about anything like that right now.
So I just sat up there in the old room and looked out at the pine tips sticking up near the stars, or at my old train that didn't run anymore but just stood there all tan from rust and rusted to the track from the leaky roof. I sat there and thought that someday I would get to work on it and get it loose and oil it, and maybe it would run again.
When I sat up there nights, I could hear the radio playing under me and Mother asking questions and Aunt Mae answering her. Aunt Mae was home nights now. Clyde went to Nashville to see some man who might give him a job on the radio there, on a music program. Every day I saw a letter around the house he wrote Aunt Mae. I could tell they were Clyde's letters because they were printed. Clyde didn't know how to write, at least I didn't think so, because I never saw him do anything but print. Aunt Mae never said when he was coming back, and I didn't care. I was glad to have her home nights to sit with Mother, even though we needed the money.
But Mother was changing, I thought. She didn't look like she did once. She got skinnier and skinnier, and her cheeks began to sink in. The skin was stretched over her nose until it looked like just an onion peel covered the bone. That's why I was glad Aunt Mae was home, so I could get upstairs. I didn't like to sit in the half-dark with her and listen to the radio. It got me scared to look at her and see her look at me with that black under her eyes. When I was around, she just looked at me, and that made me feel uncomfortable. Even when we were eating. She wouldn't eat if I was at the table with her. She just sat there with the food in front of her and stared at me. After she did this a while, Aunt Mae had to give us our food at a different time so both of us could eat, because I couldn't eat either with her staring at me.