“That and what with all the flowers beginning to bloom,” I said as though I had a clue.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “All right, my dear. The prescription will be waiting on you when you get there.”
“I’ll go over during my lunch hour.”
I’d graduated high school the year before. After my sister married the bum, my parents had placed all their hope for a college grad in the family on me. Then, as graduation crept closer and closer, and much to my parents’ disapproval, I made the monumental decision not to go to college right away, but to give myself a year off from the world of academics. I’d spent my senior year in a job program the high school offered. Every weekday, instead of staying until three, I walked out after lunch, threw what few books I now lugged onto the backseat of my car, and then drove three miles to a local printing company located on a downtown side street. There I learned the trade of “office work.” There wasn’t a whole lot to it, but I got along well with the owners and the customers. Within weeks I could take job orders like a pro, had learned the art of upselling, and had—as my employer Mr. Foster said—organized the storeroom and filing cabinets into something manageable.
Before I’d come to work there, the whole operation was a nightmare. Mr. Foster—sixty if he was a day—and his wife innately knew where everything went, but to the rest of the employees (in other words, me), the storeroom seemed a web of confusion.
Then, as I neared graduation, Mrs. Foster had to have some type of life-altering surgery and Mr. Foster asked if I’d like to stay on during the summer with an increase in hours “until you go on off to school.”
I explained to Mr. Foster that I had given myself a year off and so staying on wouldn’t be a problem.
“But why?” he asked, as if I’d told him no. “Why wouldn’t you want to grab your education by the throat as soon as you can?”
The question jarred me. “I—uh—well, to be honest, Mr. Foster, I don’t have a clue what I want to do with the rest of my life—no idea at all—and I thought that—maybe with a little time—”
Mr. Foster removed his readers and dropped them into one of the pockets of the dark-green bib apron he wore at work. “All you’ll do the first year or so is take the basic classes. May as well get them out of the way while you’re deciding.”
I frowned. “Have you been talking with my parents, Mr. Foster?”
Mr. Foster’s jawline went slack. “Why, no. I just think that—you young people today don’t know how lucky you are to get to go off to college. Back in my day it wasn’t as easy. It was a different America.”
I smiled now. “I’ve heard.” If not from my teachers, from my parents. And if not from my parents, from my grandmother, who I called “Grand,” because—oh, she just was.
“Southern women are strong by nature,” she’d once told me. “We are the true Scarlett O’Haras. We raise our radishes into the air and declare that as God is my witness, we shall never go hungry again.” She squared her eyes with mine. “Remember that when life tries to kick you down.”
“So, I mean, if you’d like,” I now said to Mr. Foster, “I can stay on as long as you need.”
“I suppose,” he agreed with a nod, “that your decision—bad as I think it may be—is a good thing for Mrs. Foster and me.”
He wasn’t kidding. Turned out, Mrs. Foster’s surgery didn’t go as well as the doctors had hoped. She decided time spent “on her feet” had come to an end, which meant that Mr. Foster gratefully offered me full-time employment. He increased my pay to $2.35 an hour, which, in those days of six-cent postage stamps, was akin to making me rich beyond my wildest dreams. Especially if I continued to live at home with Mama and Daddy. And I remained careful of frivolity.
I disconnected my call with Dr. Carter that afternoon, managed to wait the good half hour until noon, then let Mr. Foster know I was going to run up to the drugstore.
“You sick?” he asked, looking up from his desk by peering over the readers perched on the tip of a too-thick nose.
I smiled to keep him from worrying. “No sir. Not really.” I touched my throat. “Just a tickle, but Dr. Carter has called in—”
“Pick me up some lozenges,” he said, his eyes dropping back to the work scattered on the metal desk. “In case I start to feel it, too.” He smiled without looking at me. “Can’t have both of us feeling puny.”
I nodded, then turned to leave, but not before he added, “And tell Gladys to put it on my bill.”
“Yes, sir,” I hollered, then opened the rattling old glass-and-wood door, closed it behind me, and headed a block up and around to where the drugstore sat wedged between a hunting supply store and a shop where all young brides and mothers-to-be registered for pricey gifts. I opened one of the double doors leading into the store and breathed in the scent of candles and incense—something new Miss Gladys had introduced along with a line of American Greetings cards that had nothing to do with birthdays or anniversaries, sympathy or sick days, and thin books of select poetry by Rod McKuen. “Trying to keep up with the times,” she’d told me the last time I’d
