ONE
A languorous ocean breeze set sail from the Bahama Islands for the coast of Florida.
It crossed the Gulf Stream and came ashore where autumn tourists sprawled on the allegedly golden but actually pale brown sands of Miami Beach. A breath of it, after crossing Miami, following a road lined with fluffy evergreens, swung finally into a stand of much larger trees: mahoganies, tamarinds, poincianas, gumbo limbos and live oaks. These it stirred audibly before it moved over a sun-brilliant lawn, entered the screened window of a dilapidated, two-story frame house and touched bright blond hair on the brow of a pretty, middle-aged woman who sat in a bed. She glanced up with the pleasant thought that the still heat of day was ended. She saw the clock. Three-twenty. She faced the screen, then, and called in a contralto that was penetrating without being harsh, “Charlee-ee!”
Her mind pictured her dark-haired, merry-eyed son, age twelve. The picture did not materialize and she remembered he was going to try to get a newspaper route after school.
She conjured up the brunette glow and giggly adolescence of her younger daughter. “Marian! Marian!”
Again there was no answer and again she remembered. Marian had said she would be delayed. Eleanor, her eldest, wasn’t due until four-thirty because she had a regular lab period that day at the university. Mrs. Yates, invalided eight years before in the accident that had taken her husband’s life, leaned back on her pillows, still smiling, and wished she hadn’t called. For she knew what would happen.
Feet strode on the crushed coral of the driveway. A foot tripped on the threshold of the back door. And a young man appeared, grinning, at the entrance of her downstairs room — a man of less than twenty-five, a tall man and thin, a stooped young man with polelike arms and legs, eyes of a faded blue, unkempt hair the hue of new rope, and a determination of mouth and chin that did not fit his over-all diffidence.
“Duff,” she said apologetically, “I didn’t mean to bring you in from the barn! What in the world were you doing, though? You’ve still got on your good gabardine slacks!”
The young man chuckled, looked down as if to check the statement, started to answer and was obliged to deal with a slight impediment of speech before saying, “Oh! Oh — sure!
Decided not to change. Not doing anything messy — labelling a lot of cans with small hardware in ’em.”