Who Do You Think You Are

steps keeping watch, no doubt listening attentively to the bumping and the breathing.
    Presently Horse came out and said he was going into the house to find Del, not to enlighten him but to see how the joke was working, this being the most important part of the proceedings, as far as Horse was concerned. He found Del eating marshmallows in the pantry and saying Ruby Carruthers wasn’t fit to piss on, he could do better any day, and he was going home.
    Meanwhile Runt had crawled under the veranda and got to work on Ruby.
    “Jesus Murphy!” said Flo.
    Then Horse came out and Runt and Ruby could hear him over head, walking on the veranda. Said Ruby, who is that? And Runt said, oh, that’s only Horse Nicholson. Then who the hell are you? said Ruby.
    Jesus Murphy!
    Rose did not bother with the rest of the story, which was that Ruby got into a bad mood, sat on the veranda steps with the dirt from underneath all over her clothes and in her hair, refused to smoke a cigarette or share a package of cupcakes (now probably rather squashed) that Runt had swiped from the grocery store where he worked after school. They teased her to tell them what was the matter and at last she said, “I think I got a right to know who I’m doing it with.”
    “She’ll get what she deserves,” said Flo philosophically. Other people thought so too. It was the fashion, if you picked up any of Ruby’s things, by mistake, particularly her gym suit or running shoes, to go and wash your hands, so you wouldn’t risk getting V.D.
    Upstairs Rose’s father was having a coughing fit. These fits were desperate, but they had become used to them. Flo got up and went to the bottom of the stairs. She listened there until the fit was over.
    “That medicine doesn’t help him one iota,” she said. “That doctor couldn’t put a Band-Aid on straight.” To the end, she blamed all Rose’s father’s troubles on medicines, doctors.
    “If you ever got up to any of that with a boy it would be the end of you,” she said. “I mean it.”
    Rose flushed with rage and said she would die first. “I hope so,” Flo said.
    H ERE IS THE sort of story Flo told Rose:
    When her mother died, Flo was twelve, and her father gave her away. He gave her to a well-to-do farming family who were to work her for her board and send her to school. But most of the time they did not send her. There was too much work to be done. They were hard people.
    “If you were picking apples and there was one left on the tree you would have to go back and pick over every tree in the entire orchard.
    The same when you were out picking up stones in the field. Leave one and you had to do the whole field again.”
    The wife was the sister of a bishop. She was always careful of her skin, rubbing it with Hinds Honey and Almond. She took a high tone with everybody and was sarcastic and believed that she had married down.
    “But she was good-looking,” said Flo, “and she give me one thing. It was a long pair of satin gloves, they were a light brown color. Fawn. They were lovely. I never meant to lose them but I did.”
    Flo had to take the men’s dinner to them in the far field. The husband opened it up and said, “Why is there no pie in this dinner?”
    “If you want any pie you can make it yourself,” said Flo, in the exact words and tone of her mistress when they were packing the dinner. It was not surprising that she could imitate that woman so well; she was always doing it, even practicing at the mirror. It was surprising she let it out then.
    The husband was amazed, but recognized the imitation. He marched Flo back to the house and demanded of his wife if that was what she had said. He was a big man, and very bad-tempered. No, it is not true, said the bishop’s sister, that girl is nothing but a troublemaker and a liar. She faced him down, and when she got Flo alone she hit her such a clout that Flo was knocked across the room into a cupboard. Her scalp was cut. It healed in time without stitches (the bishop’s sister didn’t get the doctor, she didn’t want talk) and Flo had the scar still.
    She never went back to school after that.
    Just before she was fourteen she ran away. She lied about her age and got a job in the glove factory, in Hanratty. But the bishop’s sister found out where she was, and every once in a while would come to see her. We forgive you, Flo. You ran away and left us but we still think of you as our Flo and our friend. You are welcome to come out and