Mrs. Chandler knew why Polly couldn’t go home, but she was too nice to let on. Polly appreciated that. That changed her letting Polly hang around the store from charity to friendship.

“The Farmers don’t take charity,” her mother would say when she was sober enough to be embarrassed that someone else wanted to do for her daughter what she could not.

That was a lot of malarkey.

They’d been on welfare off and on since the third-or maybe the fourth-stepfather had gone north to Chicago, where he was going to make a killing in the oil fields and then send for them.

Truckloads of malarkey.

Polly’s mom had waited by the phone until Polly told her there weren’t any oil fields in Chicago.

A fist or a foot or a head slammed into the door. Polly pounded back angrily with the flat of her hand.

“Would you pass out so I can go to the bathroom!” she yelled.

Ma Danko, the old colored woman who lived two trailers down, looked up from the laundry basket she cradled in her stick-thin arms.

“Why don’t you come on home with me and have some cookies?” Ma said.

“I better not, but thanks,” Polly replied. “You know how it is.”

“I do. But you come on anyway if it starts raining.”

“I will.”

But she wouldn’t. Of all charity, Polly’s mom hated charity from Negroes the worst. “You just remember you’re white,” her mother would say. “Niggers got no business feeling sorry for a white girl.”

A scudding wind picked up leaves and litter and threw them at Polly in cold mockery. “It’s getting downright chilly,” Ma said. “It’s gonna be a bitter rain. Cookies is still warm from the oven.”