It was raining worse than it had been earlier in the evening, and I stopped by the doorway to turn up my coat collar. Then I saw her standing there. It was Ruth, and she looked as though she had been standing there for hours.
“Toby threw me out,” she said.
“Get the hell out of here. I'm not having any,” I said.
“It's for good this time. He locked me out and won't even let me in to get a toothbrush.”
“I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything. To hell with it. You knew about Toby when you went with him. I don't want to hear your hard-luck story.”
It was raining so hard that the water was running off my hat in a stream. Water was dripping down the back of my neck too, and when I pulled my collar closer it was clammy on my skin. I looked at Ruth standing there in that puddle, and I wondered how long she had been there waiting for me to come out of Uncle's.
“I haven't got any money,” she told me. There isn't any place I can go.”
I stepped back in the doorway where there was some light, but all I had left was about forty-five cents in change. Poppa wouldn't cash a check, either.
“To hell with you then,” Ruth said.
She started to go off down the street. I looked after her for a minute, and then I followed her.
“You'll have to go someplace else tomorrow,” I said. “I don't want you around my place longer than that.”
I had a feeling that I was doing something very foolish to let her stay there even for the night, and if I had waited there in the doorway a while longer I probably wouldn't have gone after her that way, and the whole thing would have been finished and over with, the way it should have been when she left me to live with the fairy, but now that I had told her she could stay that night I couldn't change my mind.