ACROSS THE FRUITED PLAIN
[ THE HOUSE OF BEECHAM]
"Oh, Rose-Ellen!" Grandma called.
Rose-Ellen slowly put down her library book and skipped into the kitchen. Grandma peppered the fried potatoes, sliced some wrinkled tomatoes into nests of wilting lettuce, and wiped her dripping face with the hem of her clean gingham apron. The kitchen was even hotter than the half-darkened sitting room where crippled Jimmie sprawled on the floor listlessly wheeling a toy automobile, the pale little baby on a quilt beside him.
Grandma squinted through the door at the old Seth Thomas dock in the sitting room. "Half after six! Rose-Ellen, you run down to the shop and tell Grandpa supper's spoiling. Why he's got to hang round that shop till supper's spoilt when he could fix up all the shoes he's got in two-three hours, I don't understand. 'Twould be different if he had anything to do. . . ."
Rose-Ellen said, "O.K., Gramma!" and ran through the hall. She'd rather get away before Grandma talked any more about the shop. Day after day she had heard about it. Grandma talked to her, though she was only ten, because she and Grandma were the only women in the family, since last winter when Mother died.
As Rose-Ellen let the front door slam behind her, she saw Daddy coming slowly up the street. The way his broad shoulders drooped and the way he took off his hat and pushed back his thick, dark hair told her as plainly as words that he hadn't found work that day. Even though you were a child, you got so tired--so tired--of the grown folks' worrying about where the next quart of milk would come from. So Rose-Ellen patted him on the arm as they passed, saying, "Hi, Daddy, I'm after Grampa!" and hop-skipped on toward the old cobbler shop. Before Rose-Ellen was born, when Daddy was a boy, even, Grandpa had had his shop at that corner of the city street.