You mean with them? Guthrie said.
That’s right.
What about you?
Oh, he’s not going to do anything to me. That’s only show. He had to do that. But you better just take it easy. You don’t want to mess with these folks. And that boy when he comes back, ease up on him for God’s sake. I told you before, we want him graduated and out of here.
He better do the work then.
Even if he doesn’t, the principal said.
I’m not changing my mind, Guthrie said.
You better listen to me, the principal said. You better hear what I’m telling you.
Ike and Bobby.
They went up the wood stairs and back along the narrow dimlit corridor after school in the afternoon, but not to collect. When she opened the door Iva Stearns said, It’s not Saturday. What is it? Are you collecting early?
No, Ike told her.
What then? What’d you come for?
They turned their heads and peered into the corridor behind them, too humble and embarrassed to say what it was they wanted even if they could have said exactly what that was.
Mrs. Stearns watched them. I see, she said. You better come in here in that case.
They passed into the room wordlessly. Her apartment was just as it always was: crowded rooms that were too hot, the stores of papers and old bills on the floor and the grocery sacks of her saved remnants loaded onto the ironing board and the portable tv on top of the big hardwood console, and over it all the inevitable smell of her cigarette smoke and the accumulation of Holt County dust. She shut the door and stood looking at them, thinking, considering, a humpbacked woman in a thin blue housedress and apron, wearing a pair of men’s wool socks inside her worn slippers, leaning on her twin silver canes.
I tell you what we better do, she said. I’ve been thinking of making cookies. But I don’t have all of the ingredients and I’ve been too lame and too lazy to go get them. You might go purchase them for me, would you?
What do you need? they said.
I’ll make a list. Do you boys eat oatmeal cookies?
Yes. We like them.
Very well. That’s what we’ll make.
She lowered herself into the stuffed chair against the wall. It took a considerable period of time. When she was seated she caught her breath and stood the two canes beside the chair. She settled the skirts of her dress and apron over her thin knees, then she said, Bring me my purse from the table in there. You know where it is.
Bobby stepped into the next room, where it was just as crowded and just as hot, and found her purse and brought it back and set it in her lap. They stood in front of the chair, watching. Her head was bent forward and they could see that the fine thin yellow-white hair scarcely covered her skull and that her ears looked raw where the bows of her glasses fit over them. The cord of her old-fashioned hearing aid curled down into the neck of her housedress where it disappeared.
She opened the leather purse and took out a wallet, then extracted ten dollars. She gave the money to Ike. That should be more than enough, she said. Bring back the change.
Yes, ma’am.
Now what do we need? She peered at them as if they might know. They stared back at her patiently, simply waiting, standing in front of her. We need most of it, she said.
She took out an ink pen and scratched about in the purse but could not find what else she wanted.