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I picked up Maideen Sumrall and we rode up and down the street. She was from the Sissum community. She was eighteen years old. "Look! Citified," she said, and pushed both hands at me; she had new white cotton gloves on. Maideen would ride there by me and talk about things I didn't mind hearing about—the Seed and Feed where she clerked and kept the books, Old Man Moody that she worked for, the way working in Morgana seemed after the country and junior college. Her first job: her mother still didn't like the idea. And people could be so nice: getting a ride home with me sometimes like this, instead of with Red Ferguson in the Coca-Cola truck. So she told me now. "And I didn't think you were going to see me at first, Ran. I saved my gloves to wear riding home in a car."

I told her my eyes had gone bad. She said she was sorry. She was country-prim and liked to have something to put in words that she could be sorry about. I drove, idling along, up and down a few times more. Mr. Steptoe was dragging the mail sack into the post office—he and Maideen waved. In the Presbyterian church Missie Spights was playing "Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown?," and Maideen listened. And on the street the same ones stood in doorways or rode in their cars, and waved at my car. Maideen's little blue handkerchief was busy waving back. She waved at them as she did at me.

"I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't hard on the eyes, to be cooped up and just count money all day, Ran"—to say something to me.

She knew what anybody in Morgana told her; and for four or five afternoons after the first one I picked her up and took her up and down the street a few turns, bought her a coke at Johnny Loomis's, and drove her home out by Old Forks and let her out, and she never said a word except a kind one, like about counting money. She was kind; her company was the next thing to being alone.

I drove her home and then drove back to Morgana to the room I had at Miss Francine Murphy's.

Next time, there at the end of the pavement, I turned up the cut to the Starks'. I couldn't stand it any longer.

Maideen didn't say a word till we reached the head of the drive and stopped.

"Ran?" she said. She wasn't asking anything. She meant just to remind me I had company, but that was what I knew. I got out and went around and opened her door.

"You want to take me in yonder?" she said. "Please, I'd just as soon you wouldn't." Her head hung. I saw the extra-white part in her hair.

I said, "Sure. Let's go in and see Jinny. Why not?"

I couldn't stand it any longer, that was why.

"I'm going and taking you."

It wasn't as if Mr. Drewsie Carmichael didn't say to me every afternoon, "Come on home with me, boy"—argue, while he banged that big Panama—like yours, Father—down on his head, "no sense in your not sleeping cool, with one of our fans turned on you. Mamie's mad at you for roasting in that room across the street from us—you could move in five minutes. Well, Ran, look: Mamie has something to say to you: I don't." And he'd wait a minute in the door before he left. He'd stand and hold his cane—the one Woody Spights and I had bought him together when he was elected Mayor—up by his head, to threaten me with comfort, till I answered him, "No thanks, sir."

Maideen was at my side. We walked across the Starks' baked yard to the front porch, passing under the heavy heads of those crape myrtles, the too bright blooms that hang down like fruits that might drop. My wife's mother—Miss Lizzie Morgan, Father—put her face to her bedroom window first thing. She'd know it first if I came back, all right. Parting her curtains with a steel crochet hook, she looked down at Randall MacLain coming to her door, and bringing who-on-earth with him.

"What are you doing here, Ran MacLain?"

When I didn't look up, she rapped on the window sill with her hook.

"I've never been inside the Stark home," Maideen said, and I began to smile. I felt curiously light-hearted. Lilies must have been in bloom somewhere near, and I took a full breath of their ether smell: consciousness could