My mother came up to put me to bed that night. She understood my tight silence. I was trying hard to keep my nerve, but the thought of coming days, weeks, months, years without Nat was dawning upon me in all its hideous emptiness.
That night I was very glad I had a mother and that she was not twitching-faced and pin-pointed of eye like Nathan’s.
CHAPTER VI
THE ODD STICK
I
My mother’s savings were exhausted in the spring of 1900. The payments on her pension were delayed. The good woman was almost alone in the world with a seam-ripping, button-bursting, small boy who demanded to be clothed, fed, educated. Rather than submit to the slavery of keeping house for some widowed farmer, she decided to move to Paris also and try to find work in a store.
Thus I ultimately rejoined Nathan.
He did not greet me as effusively as I had expected. His indifference hurt. But I soon made allowance. Nathan was in love. The object of his affections was Bernie Gridley.
“Come over to my house and tell me all about her,” I invited that first noontime.
“After school? I can’t. I work.”