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Show 382 "Not that she's apt to admit it if she don't have to," said Aunt Ruth. "That whole family was a caution." "Hated bugs, every one of them," said Aunt Phoebe. "I remember that." "Do you remember the picnic at Bear Lake on the twenty-fourth of July," said Uncle Joe. "I forget the year. Grace and Charlie were just married, and Grace was afraid to go in the water." "No, I think they were still just courting," said Aunt Ruth. "It was cold that July, I remember," said Aunt Lucy. "That was the summer it frosted over Monte Cristo and clear down into Randolph. Two of our chickens died. Froze them right to death." After a while they spoke only gibberish, and he tuned them out and just watched swirls of cake batter folding over and over onto themselves in endless spirals, the grainy coloring overlapping the white and gradually homogenizing. * * * * * * He spent the second week of his new life in Downtown Los Angeles, where he felt as though a lid had closed over him and he would never be seen again. A tiny doll-like woman named Cassie, who had a pixie hair cut and enormous eyes, and her two assistants put Lorin and twelve other people, most of them young men in the officer training program, through hypothetical problems, which they acted out through model teller windows on casters, where someone with an account in another branch wanted to cash a check at your window or someone with insufficient funds was trying to pull a fast one with a second endorsement and how did you stop him or someone tried to make a deposit in an account not his own and what did you do. He was reimbursed thirteen cents a mile to make the drive and was panhandled twice |
