Rich/Solitaire [antikvár]

It was one of those days when the heat comes in suffocating waves, and you only had to leave your house and walk a few yards down Main Street, just to Scully's Hardware for a bag of beans or some washing soda, or maybe down to the little fish stall on the corner of Galveston Street for some snapper, and your clothes began to feel hot and sticky and uncomfortable, and your boots too tight, and you started to think about ice-cream sodas or lemon water ice, sipped at the shady tables of Howard's Refreshment Parlor. There was no such person as Howard, never had been. The parlour was run by a small birdlike widow called Mrs Grey, who ran up and down behind her high marble-topped counter in a rigid white apron, serving up sundaes and milk shakes in moulded glass dishes. She served advice, too, if you needed it, or even if you didn't. Mrs Grey considered that the free dissemination of worldly wisdom was part and parcel of the function of selling ices. When Janet stepped across the scrubbed wooden floor that afternoon in August, the place was crowded, and the conversation tumbled warm and lazy through the cool filtered sunlight. Mrs Grey was piling the last creamy layer onto a seven-layer strawberry ice, and talking to a big, sweatylooking man in a worn blue jacket and patched-up trousers. If you want my opinion, young feller,' she was saying, as she popped a final cherry on top, f>ou'll take yourself up North, and find yourself a factory to work in. There's regular employment up there, I hear the wages are better than ever. Things move slow down here, always have, and always will.' The man didn't seem to be listening. He was drawing invisible patterns on the cold marble counter with his blunt, workingman's finger. These days,' said Mrs Grey, 'you have to know your onions if you want to make anything out of yourself. Time was, a pick and a shovel and a broad back was good enough. But these days, if you don't know your onions, you'll finish your