| OCR Text |
Show 10 drug store phoned. She had the job. The job was all that she had hoped for: eight hours a day, Monday through Saturday, throughout the vacation. She made the most of it. She was a good clerk-a natural-very good with customers. What she didn't know about cosmetics, she made up for in her concern with people. Generally, she liked people, she enjoyed waiting on them, taking an interest in them and their needs. And when there was no one at her counter, she busied herself straightening items, rearranging displays. With everything in shape in her own department, she would take a bottle of Windex and a rag, and dust shelves throughout the store. And it was here, dusting shelves at work, that she gradually began to think about her parents, gradually began to approach that pain in her. It had to be examined, she felt, this loss, to determine what it was. What its relationship to her was. She began to handle it with her mind, to feel it out. Gingerly at first. And then discovering that it was not that tender, twisting and turning it, this way and that. It was ugly. It was an ugly thing. And again she was angered by it. She wanted to drive it from her. To make herself as she was before all this happened. Her mind hard against it, she would push it from her. There. It was no longer a part of her. She tried, she tried to drive it from herself. She stretched her mind, her conscious mind, out against it, |
