Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/141

 know how he is … When I get to making money of my own I'm going to enjoy it … I'm going to buy you some things you need too. You never spend anything on yourself."

"I don't need anything."

"You do too … You know you do, Mother."

"We can't afford everything we want right now."

Once more an old fact was brought sharply before him. It was one that his father had been saying as long as he could remember.

Now he thought of his father either timidly or morosely but as frankly as he knew how. His father was a shrewd man. In his conversation a few seconds before, he had been surprised that his mother still took up for him. His father was a farmer, a German and something of a dictator. The sound of these stuck crossways in his mind. They sounded right for this man who had always held the upper hand over him. Never giving but always demanding. Well, he wouldn't be under his firm rule forever … He'd make his own way in the world and buy what he wanted. He'd buy his mother anything she wanted but his father could buy for himself.

Glenn Rogers departed from his mother and went to his room bearing his school books. He did not open them but lay on his bed for some time dwelling resentfully on his father's attitude; simultaneously, with masculine inconsistency, he told himself that if his father had been possessed with a single token of love, he would have suggested his using the car sometimes. After all, he used the pick-up most of the time and his mother couldn't drive. He had never taught her. But it was clear to him that he would never ask for it. It would have to come from his father's lips before he'd take the darn old car to school.

He gazed around the room not seeing the iron bed, maple dresser, the large worn artificial leather chair or the gingham curtain in the corner behind which he hung his clothes.

He turned on the small radio he had bought with "cotton-picking money" and then off again before a sound came from it. He opened a book; tried to dismiss his father from his mind, and settled down to hard thinking along more objective lines. Obviously, the car was not the best means of bringing alien elements harmoniously together; it 131