“You make sure you don’t go over on them scales now,” Miss Hester, the produce manager, would remind him whenever she saw him looking for too long a time out of the window. “Mr. Milton would git mad if you went over ten pounds.”

Thomas always knew when she was watching him and just when she would speak. He had developed an instinct for this from being around her. He knew that it worried her when he was silent because she could not know what he was thinking. He knew, even at that age, that he was brighter than she was; and he thought that she must know it too because he could sense her getting uncomfortable when she stood in back of him in her blue smock, watching him lift the potatoes to the plastic bag until it was almost full, and then the plastic bag up to the gray metal scale, and then watching the red arrow fly across to 10. Somehow it almost always stopped wavering at exactly ten pounds. Filling the bags was automatic with him, a conditioned reflex, and he could do it quite easily, without breaking his concentration on things beyond the window. And he knew that this bothered her a great deal; so much so, in fact, that she constantly asked him questions, standing by the counter or the sink behind him, to make him aware that she was in the room. She was always nervous when he did not say anything for a long time and he knew this too, and was sometimes silent, even when he had something to say, so that she could hear the thud and swish of the potatoes going into the bag, rhythmically, and the sound of the bags coming down on the scale, and after a second, the sound, sputtering and silken, of the tops of the bags being twisted and sealed in the tape machine. Edward liked to produce these sounds for her because he knew she wanted something more.

Miss Hester had toes like the Barefoot Lady, except that her nails were shorter and cleaner, and except that she was white. She always wore sandals, was hefty like a man, and had hair under her arms. Whenever she smiled he could not think of her face or smile as that of a woman. It was too tight. And her laugh was too loud and came from too far away inside her. And the huge crates of lettuce or cantaloupes or celery she could lift very easily made her even less a woman. She had short red-brown hair, and whenever he got very close to her it seemed very much unlike the Rich Old Lady’s smell.

“What you daydreamin’ about so much all the time?” she asked him once.

“I was just thinking, Miss Hester,” he had said.

“What about?”

“School and things.”

He could sense her standing behind him at the sink, letting her hands pause on the knife and the celery she was trimming.