He looked so sweet,” she wailed.
“Now, now,” Miss Lorraine said.
“Drink a little beer.
You’ll feel better.
Miss Myrtle’s took again,” she said, raising her voice.
“I got too tender a heart,” Miss Myrtle said.
She snuffled behind the handkerchief, groping for her tankard.
She groped for a moment, then it touched her hand.
She looked quickly up.
“You, Uncle Bud!” she said.
“Didn’t I tell you to come out from behind there and play?
Would you believe it?
The other afternoon when we left here I was so mortified I didn’t know what to do.
I was ashamed to be seen on the street with a drunk boy like you.”
Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin.
“This’ll put some heart into us,” she said.
“We’re setting here like three old sick cats.”
They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips.
Then they began to talk.
They were all talking at once, again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation.
“It’s us girls,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Men just cant seem to take us and leave us for what we are.
They make us what we are, then they expect us to be different.
Expect us not to never look at another man, while they come and go as they please.”
“A woman that wants to fool with more than one man at a time is a fool,” Miss Reba said.
“They’re all trouble, and why do you want to double your trouble?
And the woman that cant stay true to a good man when she gets him, a free-hearted spender that never give her a hour’s uneasiness or a hard word.……” looking at them, her eyes began to fill with a sad, unutterable expression, of baffled and patient despair.
“Now, now,” Miss Myrtle said.
She leaned forward and patted Miss Reba’s huge hand.
Miss Lorraine made a faint clucking sound with her tongue.
“You’ll get yourself started.”
“He was such a good man,” Miss Reba said.
“We was like two doves.
For eleven years we was like two doves.”
“Now, dearie; now, dearie,” Miss Myrtle said.
“It’s when it comes over me like this,” Miss Reba said.
“Seeing that boy laying there under them flowers.”
“He never had no more than Mr Binford had,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Now, now.
Drink a little beer.”
Miss Reba brushed her sleeve across her eyes. She drank some beer.
“He ought to known better than to take a chance with Popeye’s girl,” Miss Lorraine said.
“Men dont never learn better than that, dearie,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Where you reckon they went, Miss Reba?”
“I dont know and I dont care,” Miss Reba said.
“And how soon they catch him and burn him for killing that boy, I dont care neither.
I dont care none.”
“He goes all the way to Pensacola every summer to see his mother,” Miss Myrtle said.
“A man that’ll do that cant be all bad.”
“I dont know how bad you like them, then,” Miss Reba said.