The Little Friend

And then the senior portraits. Tuxedoes, pimples, pearls. Big-jawed country girls looking awkward in the photographer’s drape. Twinkly Angie Stanhope, who’d won everything that year, who’d married right out of high school, who now looked so pasty and faded and thick about the waist when Harriet saw her in the grocery store. But there was no sign of Danny Ratliff. Had he failed? Dropped out? She turned the page, to baby pictures of the graduating seniors (Diane Leavitt talking on a play plastic telephone; scowling Pem in a soggy diaper, swaggering about a toy pool), and with a shock found herself looking down at a photo of her dead brother.

Yes, Robin: there he was opposite, on a page to himself, frail and freckled and glad, wearing a huge straw hat that looked as if it might belong to Chester. He was laughing—not as if he was laughing at something funny but in a sweet way, as if he loved the person who was holding the camera. ROBIN WE MISS YOU!!! read the caption. And, underneath, his graduating classmates had all signed their names.

For a long time, she studied the picture. She would never know what Robin’s voice had sounded like, but she had loved his face all her life, and had followed its modulations tenderly throughout a fading trail of snapshots: random moments, miracles of ordinary light. What would he have looked like, grown up? There was no way of knowing. To judge from his photograph, Pemberton had been a very ugly baby—broad-shouldered and bow-legged, with no neck, and no indication at all that he would grow up to be handsome.

There was no Danny Ratliff in Pem’s class for the previous year (though there was Pem again, as Jolly Junior) but running her finger down the alphabetized list of the class behind Pemberton’s, suddenly she landed on his name: Danny Ratliff.

Her eye jumped to the column opposite. Instead of a photograph there was only a spiky cartoon of a teenager with his elbows on a table, poring over a piece of paper that said “Exam Cheat Sheet.” Below the drawing, jangly beatnik capitals read: TOO BUSY—PHOTO NOT AVAILABLE.

So he’d failed at least one year. Had he dropped out of school after the tenth grade?

When she went back another year, she finally found him: a boy with thick bangs brushed low on his forehead, covering his eyebrows—handsome, but in a threatening way, like a hoodlum pop star. He looked older than a ninth-grader. His eyes were half-hidden beneath the low fringe of hair, which gave him a mean, hooded look; his lips were insolently pursed as if he was about to spit out a piece of gum or blow a raspberry.

She studied the picture for a long time. Then, carefully, she scissored it out, and tucked it in her orange notebook.

“Harriet, get down here.” Ida’s voice, at the foot of the stairs.

“Maam?” called Harriet, hastening to finish.

“Who been poking holes in this lunch bucket?”

————

Hely did not call that afternoon, or that night. The next morning—which was rainy—he didn’t come by either so Harriet decided to walk over to Edie’s house to see if she had made breakfast.

“A deacon!” said Edie. “Trying to turn a profit from a church outing of widows and retired ladies!” She was dressed—handsomely—in khaki shirt and dungarees, for she was to spend the day working at the Confederate cemetery with the Garden Club. “ ‘Well,’ he said to me,” (lips pursed, mimicking Mr. Dial’s voice) “ ‘but Greyhound would charge you eighty dollars.’ Greyhound! ‘Well!’ I said. ‘I find that not at all surprising! The last I heard, Greyhound was still running a money-making concern!’ ”

She was looking at the newspaper over the tops of her half-moon spectacles as she said this: her voice was queenly, withering. She had taken no notice of her granddaughter’s silence, which had driven Harriet (crunching quietly at her toast) into a deeper and more determined sulk. She had felt quite hard towards Edie ever since her conversation with Ida—more so, because Edie was always writing letters to congressmen and senators, getting up petitions, fighting to save this old landmark or that endangered species. Was not Ida’s welfare as important as whatever Mississippi waterfowl occupied Edie’s energies so profoundly?

“Of course, I didn’t bring it up,” said Edie, and sniffed an imperious sniff as if to say: and he’d better be glad I didn’t as she picked up her paper and gave it a rattle, “but I never will forgive Roy Dial for the way he did Daddy on that last car he bought. Daddy got mixed up about things there at the last. He might as well have knocked Daddy on the pavement and stolen the money out of his pocket.”