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and mean, but I don’t think he’s too smart. How smart can a guy be who can’t trim his mustache right? There that mustache sits, like a fishing jig, right under his nose. It don’t even reach the sides of his mouth. I never see’d such a crazy-looking mustache in all my life. When Ma saw Jimmy showing me that stuff, she got real ornery. “We have enough to worry about right here at home. We don’t need to be worrying about what’s going on halfway around the world.”
    I eat the parts of my sandwich I like, then toss the crust into the empty bag. “Jimmy? That nutty guy with the chopped-off mustache, he gonna come take over Willowridge too?”
    Jimmy rubs my head and says, “Don’t you worry about it, Earwig. Ain’t nothing ever gonna change in Willowridge. That you can count on.” But I still worry.
    When Delbert leaves, Dad eats the sandwich and cookies I set out for him. He’s still thinking about that Europe place. I can tell, ’cause when Jimmy tries talking to him about the motor he’s got torn apart in the garage, Dad don’t even hear him.
    That night, we sit in the living room eating warm molasses cookies as we listen to the Bob Hope Pepsodent Show . Dad ain’t got sweat on his face no more. “That Jerry Colonna is one nutty bastard!” Dad laughs as Jerry sings some crazy version of “Blueberry Hill.” We are all laughing our asses off, ’cept for Ma, who says, “I think he should leave the singing to Judy Garland.”
    And that’s how the summer and fall of 1940 goes. Me working to pay for what I done wrong and waiting for that Mrs. Pritchard to get back on her fat feet so I can stop doing housework that Jimmy says will make me grow titties if it keeps up much longer.
    When Mrs. Pritchard finally comes limping into the store, I’m hoping Ma remembers that she limped before I axed her. I hide in the kitchen, listening, as Mrs. Pritchard tells Ma all about her “recuperation” and about how she hopes Ma taught me a lesson. Ma says, “I assure you, I did.” Then they talk about how that Dickens girl got healed up and how glad they are that summer’s over and that polio season is gone.
    ’Cause Mrs. Pritchard is on her feet now, and ’cause the polio season is gone, Ma lets me run around again, but she don’t take away them damn chores she added, and I can’t leave ’til they’re done, so there ain’t much time to do anything fun anyway.
    Funny how things are. You have them worst days of washing clothes and stocking shelves, and you hate them lousy days when you’re in ’em. And then you have them best days too, like sucker fishing at the millpond, and later your dad saying that the sucker you speared is the best goddamn sucker he ever ate, and you figure them is the best days you’re ever gonna have. Later though, when times get real bad, them bad days and them best days get all mixed together in your head, and you think of the whole lot of ’em as something special. Something so goddamn special that you’d give your right nut to go back to ’em.

Chapter 4
    I t’s Jimmy’s twenty-first birthday, so Ma starts baking him a cake soon as her and me get back from church. She frosts it with seven-minute frosting, which I hate ’cause it gets this crunchy coating on top like snow that melted and then frozed up again. When I tell Ma this, she says it ain’t my birthday, it’s Jimmy’s, and he likes seven-minute frosting just fine.
    Jimmy’s whole room smells like beer farts when I go to wake him up to tell him Louie and John are downstairs and wanna go over to Floyd’s to do a little hunting. Since it’s Sunday, John don’t have to work at the Knox Lumber Factory, and Louie, who logs with his dad, he don’t work on any day he don’t wanna work. Floyd, he farms with his dad, and ’cept for milking so the cows’ tits don’t bust, they don’t do nothing else on Sunday either, ’cause that’s the day God says you gotta take a rest.
    “You get plastered last night,