"I'll get my bill changed at the A & P," Jerry decided. And went so fast in that direction that the bag holding the potatoes fell out of the cart and broke and Jerry lost two of them down a sewer. After that he went more slowly, though he found it hard to make the heavy cart go downhill slowly. It made his arms ache holding it back.
2
Change for a Ten-Dollar Bill
Having to drag a heavy cart with a big bag of groceries in it nearly a mile to the shopping center became considerable of a chore even before Jerry was halfway there.
"Lemme see," he thought as he bumped the cart down a curb. "I know I have to put away eight dollars and twenty-one cents for Mr. Bartlett. How much is that from ten dollars? That's the right change for Mummy."
Jerry had a pained look on his face as he tried to do the subtraction in his head. He was never any good in mental arithmetic. Give him a pencil in his hand and he could do pretty well at figuring. But his mind seemed to go blank when he had to carry and all that in his head. He reached in all his pockets but did not have a pencil. And he knew he had to ask for the right change.
Just then Jerry saw Carl Weston coming up the street. He was a classmate of Jerry's in the sixth grade. He wore thick-lensed glasses and was quite a brain. He'd be almost sure to have a pencil or a ballpoint pen. But Jerry asked him and he didn't, so Jerry gave him a line about being a whiz at arithmetic and said he bet Carl could say right off how much money you'd have left if you subtracted eight dollars and twenty-one cents from ten dollars.
For a few seconds Jerry saw a human adding-machine at work. Then Carl said, "One dollar and seventy-nine cents, of course." He didn't add "Stupid," but he looked as if that were what he was thinking. Jerry didn't care. He knew a lot of important things Carl didn't know, such as baseball averages and who were the home-run kings for the past five years.