Sweeping Up Glass Read Online Free PDF

She’s done it, too—or she wouldn’t have Junk.”
    “Well,” Love Alice said. “Maybe it hard to think of her boy all growed up.”
    I wondered how a man the size of Junk Hanley could do
anything
with this girl who was no bigger than a toothpick. I bit my lip. “What’s it like, Love Alice?”
    She twisted her mouth, finding the words.
    Junk had sat eating bread and jam with me. I wished we weren’t talking about him.
    She drew back her lips. “The first time I kep’ my teeth—so. ’Cause it hurt like anythang. But when Junk seen the blood, he got weepy, say he never gonna do that again.”
    A dozen pigtails bobbed up and down. “But I say,
Mm-hmm, husband, you comin’ at me again
. An’ sure enough, the next night—”
    “Oh, you poor thing.”
    “O-livvy, sometime he big around as a syrup jar!” She shrugged. “I get used to it. Amazin’ what a man can do, and later on—”
    I sat there blinking.
    “Later on,” she said, grinning, “it like too much pecan pie.”
    “Really.”
    Love Alice laughed. “Oh, here come ol’ Mr. French.” Shejumped up and pressed her back against Dooby’s window, her eyes on the sidewalk.
    I’d seen Love Alice do this a hundred times. When I’d told Pap how much I hated it, he said to let things be.
    “Love Alice, after you lost that baby out at Doc’s, how come you never had another one?”
    She sighed. “I’z no more’n seven or eight. Takin’ a shortcut home. A white man I never seen before, he come outa the field, and he throwed me down on this dirt road. I was so little I fitted in a rut. After, I was all swole up, purple and bleedin’. Mammy said she like to lost me. Doc said sumpin’ was tore real bad. Now I ain’t ever gon’ have babies.”
    I was angry with the whole world for making Love Alice lie down in a rut. It was then, through the window, that I saw Dooby’s sparkling soda counter, the stools that spun.
    “Love Alice, come on in and have an ice cream cone with me.”
    She shook her head.
    “Don’t you like ice cream?”
    She put her hands behind her back.
    “I’ll treat you. My pap’ll pay for it.”
    “You know Mr. Dooby don’t allow it.”
    “That’s a stupid rule.”
    “Don’t matter.” She wagged her head and the pigtails flopped around some more.
    “Well then, I have somethin’ to say to Mr. Dooby.”
    “Oh no, O-livvy!”
    But I’d already marched into the store with both my chin and my backside in the air, and I stood where Dooby was unpacking boxes in the middle aisle.
    “Mr. Dooby,” I said. “How come you don’t let coloreds in here?”
    He took cans of snuff from the box and lined them up on a shelf, just so. “They can come in, Olivia. They just got to come around to the back door. Then if there’s no white folks shopping—”
    “Mr. Dooby, that’s not very Christian.”
    “You and your pap do the same thing. Coloreds shop one day a week. They get what they need. I fixed Miss Dovey’s medicine for her backache this morning, and powders to help her sister’s gout.”
    I was embarrassed that it was our rule, too, and I was spoiling for a fight. “Well, I’d like one ice cream cone for Love Alice, and one for me, please, and put them on my pap’s bill.” I had never done such a thing before, and Pap would tear me apart.
    “Can’t do that, Olivia,” he said. “We don’t serve coloreds from the soda fountain. You know that.”
    “Then I would like two cones for myself, Mr. Dooby. One chocolate and one strawberry.”
    “Olivia—”
    “You won’t let me have two cones in case I give one to Love Alice,” I said.
    “Yes, ma’am, that’s right.”
    I dropped my chin and watched him from under my eyelids. “Then I guess I’ll take just one.”
    “All right, then.” He sighed like grown-ups do when a child tries them mightily. “Chocolate, is it?”
    I climbed on the stool and watched him open the carton, dip the frozen stuff into a cone. I tried not to think about Pap’s bill at the