She hugged her knees. A misguided ant mistook her thigh for the path home. Vida wriggled and pulled her red print dress between her knees. She had walked to the corner and back twice, never stepping on a crack to make her wish come true. A shooting star lanced the sky. She wished again. She wished Lucy Claudel would be her best friend and some night instead of going with a boy, Lucy would take a long, long walk with her. They would put their arms around each other's waists and tell each other secrets. It wasn't that she had secrets to tell but you have to tell secrets to be told secrets, and she so wanted to hear from Lucy the story of her life. A life of thirteen years of more excitement than had happened to all of Twelfth Street forever.
It had happened this way. Two months ago, Miss Welland next door told Vida's mother that her sister Mae was coming back home to live, bringing her sick child. The poor things were starving in Denver.
"Serves her right," had said Mr. Bertrand sourly, washing at the kitchen sink. The sagged curve of his wet mouth matched his shapeless grey pants. A fourteen-year resentment spurted anew at Mae Welland who had turned him down and up and married a traveling salesman from New Orleans. A foreigner! If she'd of married someone with money you could of understood it. But a traveling salesman yet, a pipsqueak who sold embroideries. The bristles of a four-day beard scrubbed his stubby fingers. He rinsed the soap, snorting and blowing water over the clean drainboard and floor. He pulled the roller towel to cleaner territory, wiped his face vindictively as though it was the reason Mae had refused him. Lint clung to his beard, aging him with white fuzz. He scraped his scalp with a comb which hung from a chain under a small mirror next to the backyard door. Mr. Bertrand looked at himself as he combed, twisting his face into a misshapen glower.
Not a bad-looking feller, he thought. She would of done better to take me.
He could see her, a small gentle tan dove with a soft light-brown pompadour and a peekaboo shirtwaist with a belt almost as small as the collar around her slender neck. His streaked watery eyes bulged as they stared into the past to see the small corseted fig-shaped hips. What did she look like now? He held out his coarse hands and inspected his nails. Choosing a small blade from his tool-
