Page:Jay Little - Maybe—Tomorrow.pdf/153

 Robert Blake was more than a name, and Gaylord blushed from the vision.

"Uh …" stammered Gaylord, "do you like strawberries, Joy?"

"Love um."

"We've got some beauties in the back yard. Come on, I want to show them to you. Some are so big and sweet. They're so much better than those you buy in the stores."

They walked to a small patch of straw covered ground; large green clusters of leaves dotted the straw. Close to the center of the green, clusters of red and pink berries peeped through, trying to find their way out of the shadows so they could lay naked in the warm sunshine.

He bent down and picked a large red one. Handing it to Joy, he said, "Here, here's a great big one."

"Isn't it a beauty," she sang, biting into it. "Uh, they're yummy, too."

"Got some more in the refrigerator. How about a dish full with some real cream over them?"

"Oh, no you don't: I've had one big lunch. A girl's got to watch herself, you know." She grinned, running her pretty hand across her flat stomach.

"You should talk about a big stomach. Look at this one." He grinned at her, making his stomach protrude.

They both laughed heartily. How pretty she had grown, he found himself thinking. She had always been pretty though. Those past years when he had gone over to her house, and they had played together, she had been so. Joy was an only child too. He remembered the day her father was found dead in his room. How they had cried together when they had found her mother weeping; their parting when Mrs. Clay had taken her daughter to a distant city, back to her mother's family in the west, and they were separated for almost a year; their return to Cotton, back to the same white house, and Joy introduced him to her new father. Funny, Mrs. Clay had married her dead husband's brother. It had seemed funny to Gaylord then.

Now, he looked at her a little more seriously. The childlike features he remembered were gone. Joy had her hair cut like a woman's. It showed her soft white neck. A sort of crazy patterned skirt hung 143