Friend of My Youth

less than an hour before, in the school driveway, he had been most genial. One of the other drivers looked at Margot and Anita and said, “Nice load you got there,” and Reuel said, “Eyes front, Buster,” moving so that the other driver could not watch them stepping onto the bus.
    Next morning before he pulled away from the store, he delivered a lecture. “I hope I’m going to have a couple of ladies on my bus today and not like yesterday. A girl saying certain things is not like a man saying them. Same thing as a woman getting drunk. A girl gets drunk or talks dirty, first thing you know she’s in trouble. Give that some thought.”
    Anita wondered if they had been stupid. Had they gone too far? They had displeased Reuel and perhaps disgusted him, made him sick of the sight of them, just as he was sick of Teresa. She was ashamed and regretful and at the same time she thought Reuel wasn’t fair. She made a face at Margot to indicate this, turning down the corners of her mouth. But Margot took no notice. She was tapping her fingertips together, looking demurely and cynically at the back of Reuel’s head.
    Anita woke up in the night with an amazing pain. She thought at first she’d been wakened by some calamity, such as a tree falling on the house or flames shooting up through the floorboards. This was shortly before the end of the school year. She had felt sick the evening before, but everybody in the family was complaining of feeling sick, and blaming it on the smell of paint and turpentine. Anita’s mother was painting the linoleum, as she did every year at this time.
    Anita had cried out with pain before she was fully awake, so that everybody was roused. Her father did not think it proper to phone the doctor before daybreak, but her mother phoned him anyway. The doctor said to bring Anita in to Walley, to the hospital. There he operated on her and removed a burst appendix, which in a few hours might have killed her. She was very sick for several days after the operation, and had to stay nearly three weeks in the hospital. Until the last few days, she could not have any visitors but her mother.
    This was a drama for the family. Anita’s father did not have the money to pay for the operation and the stay in the hospital—he was going to have to sell a stand of hard-maple trees. Her mother took the credit, rightly, for saving Anita’s life, and as long as she lived she would mention this, often adding that she had gone against her husband’s orders. (It was really only against his advice.) In a flurry of independence and self-esteem she began to drive the car, a thing she had not done for years. Shevisited Anita every afternoon and brought news from home. She had finished painting the linoleum, in a design of white and yellow done with a sponge on a dark-green ground. It gave the impression of a distant meadow sprinkled with tiny flowers. The milk inspector had complimented her on it, when he stayed for dinner. A late calf had been born across the creek and nobody could figure out how the cow had got there. The honeysuckle was in bloom in the hedge, and she brought a bouquet and commandeered a vase from the nurses. Anita had never seen her sociability turned on like this before for anybody in the family.
    Anita was happy, in spite of weakness and lingering pain. Such a fuss had been made to prevent her dying. Even the sale of the maple trees pleased her, made her feel unique and treasured. People were kind and asked nothing of her, and she took up that kindness and extended it to everything around her. She forgave everyone she could think of—the principal with his glittery glasses, the smelly boys on the bus, unfair Reuel and chattering Teresa and rich girls with lamb’s-wool sweaters and her own family and Margot’s father, who must suffer in his rampages. She didn’t tire all day of looking at the thin yellowish curtains at the window and the limb and trunk of a tree visible to her. It was an ash tree, with strict-looking corduroy lines of bark and thin petal leaves that were losing their fragility and sharp spring green, toughening and darkening as they took on summer maturity. Everything made or growing in the world seemed to her to deserve congratulations.
    She thought later that this mood of hers might have come from the pills they gave her for the pain. But perhaps not entirely.
    She had been put in a single room because she was so sick. (Her father had told her mother to ask how much extra