Manhunt. Volume 2, Number 10, December, 1954

Mrs. Corbin was an attractive, neat woman, married to Joe Corbin who repaired watches at Platt the Jeweler’s. She had a pleasant open smile, impersonal eyes, and wonderful eyebrows, plucked and pencilled, that rose in twin symmetrical arcs almost to the brim of her close-fitting felt hat, giving her a provocative, surprised look. Every afternoon about four, Mrs. Corbin came into the store and bought her two pounds of sugar; it was during the war with the Kaiser, and the sale of sugar was strictly kept to two pounds per day per customer. Then she would linger at the counter for a while, chatting amiably as if she had all the time in the world; but it was clear to Don’s fast-maturing perceptions that Mrs. Corbin had other things on her mind besides the small talk; that her thoughts were elsewhere.

Don had got so used to measuring out the regulation two pounds of sugar that he could do it accurately, almost every time, without weighing it. He took the aluminum scoop, dug into the big sugar barrel that swung from below the counter on a squeaking arm-like arrangement, held the scoop high in the air, and let the sugar fall beautifully into the paper sack, which he had already whipped open with a professional flip of his left hand; then he plunked the bag onto the scales, watched the needle wag to and fro for a second, and there it was: two pounds even. He folded the flap doubly over the top, wound the white string twice around the sack, and breaking the string with a smart quick yank, he handed the sugar over to Mrs. Corbin. And then she would say, every darned afternoon — the arched eyebrows rippling higher and the cool impersonal eyes gazing directly into his: “Oh, I just remembered! May I use the phone a minute, please...”

“Why certainly,” Don would say, never batting an eye, “just help yourself, Mrs. Corbin.” Then, because he knew what was coming and, as became a man of the world, must be discreet, he turned back to the sugar barrel and tossed off a few more two-pound bags, in readiness for the next customers who asked for them.

Mrs. Corbin stepped to the wall telephone with the goose neck a few feet away, picked up the phone book that hung from a cord beside it, and opening the directory to somewhere in the middle, she would peer intently at the long list of names there and run an inquiring finger slowly down the page. “Mrs... Mrs... Mrs... Mrs...” she would murmur, just loud enough for him to hear, and then give Central the number in lowered tones that could not be heard at all. Don smiled to himself. He knew what the number was — 424, Hersey’s saloon; and Mrs. Corbin was calling up Mr. Hersey to find out when he was to be free and where she was to pick him up this time, before they drove out to the pines after supper to park for awhile after dark. He knew this because Mr. Heffelfinger had told him, with a hearty laugh, that that’s what was going on; and now, after so many afternoons of “Mrs... Mrs... Mrs... Mrs...” he could see it for himself. He was entranced. He would love to have told his father and mother, but of course they would only have said he was taking a great deal for granted, smarty, a very great deal indeed, and had a dirty mind besides. Instead, he told three or four of his friends in High School, and together they laughed and laughed.

Within a few weeks after he had started at the Arcadia Grocery, Mr. Heffelfinger suddenly changed Don’s dinner hour on Saturday noon. At first, he had gone home to dinner at eleven-thirty when Mr. Kunkel did, returning at twelve-thirty to relieve Mr. Heffelfinger and Jake, the other assistant. Now, for a reason that wasn’t at once clear to Don, Mr. Heffelfinger asked him to switch places with Jake, and Jake went home for dinner at the same time as Mr. Kunkel. This left Mr. Heffelfinger and Don alone together during the noon hour, a time of day when hardly anybody ever came into the store at all. But one of these few was Miss Bye, who invariably arrived a few minutes after Jake and Mr. Kunkel had gone home.

Miss Bye was a very short, very fat woman of maybe fifty, with hair dyed a lifeless jet-black like a wig, and puffy cheeks coated with talcum powder so thick that she looked as if she had just recovered from having her face stuck in the flour barrel in the back room. She wore a single large pearl on each ear lobe, and her pudgy hands glittered with rings. In her shiny silk dress of a changeable coppery color, she swelled outward in front like a pouter pigeon and in back like a lawn roller, and she had been stuffed so tightly into her irridescent dress that she looked like a gorgeous pincushion.