“You gonna finish high school?”

“I guess so.”

“You must be pretty smart, huh Tommy?”

“No. I ain’t so smart,” he said.

“But you sure do think a lot.”

“Maybe I just daydream,” Thomas told her.

Her knife had started cutting into the celery branches again. He kept up his bagging.

“Well, anyway, you a good worker. You a good boy, Tommy.”

Thomas did not say anything.

“Your brother, he’s a good worker too. But he ain’t like you, though.”

“I know,” he said.

“He talks a lot up front. All the cashiers like him a lot.”

“Eddie likes to talk,” Thomas said.

“Yeah,” said Miss Hester. “Maybe he talks too much. Mr. Milton and Miss Martha are watchin’ him.”

“What for?”

She stopped cutting the celery again. “I donno,” she said. “I reckon it’s jest that he talks a lot.”

IV

ON SATURDAY NIGHTS Thomas and his brother would buy the family groceries in the Feinberg Super Market. Checking the list made out by his mother gave Thomas a feeling of responsibility that he liked. He was free to buy things not even on the list and he liked this too. They paid for the groceries out of their own money, and doing this, with some of the employees watching, made an especially good feeling for him. Sometimes they bought ice cream or a pie or something special for their mother. This made them exceptional. The other black employees, the carry-out boys, the stock clerks, the bag boys, would have no immediate purpose in mind for their money beyond eating a big meal on Saturday nights or buying whiskey from a bootlegger because they were minors, or buying a new pair of brightly colored pants or pointed shoes to wear into the store on their day off, as if to make all the other employees see that they were above being, at least on this one day, what they were all the rest of the week.

Thomas and his brother did not have a day off: they worked straight through the week, after school, and they worked all day on Saturdays. But Edward did not mop on Sunday mornings and he still went to church. Thomas felt relieved that his brother was almost certain to be on the Right Side on That Day because he had stayed in the church and would never be exposed to all the stealing the mopping crew did when they were alone in the store on Sunday mornings with Benny Bills, the manager, who looked the other way when they stole packages of meat and soda and cartons of cigarettes. Thomas suspected that Mr. Bills was stealing bigger things himself, after they had finished mopping and waxing and after he had locked the crew out of the store just after twelve o’clock each Sunday. Thomas also suspected that Milton Feinberg, a big-boned man who wore custom-made shoes and smoked very strong bad-smelling green cigars, knew just what everyone was stealing and was only waiting for a convenient time to catch certain people. He could see it in the way he smiled and rolled the cigar around in his mouth whenever he talked to certain of the bigger stealers; and seeing this, Thomas never stole. At first he thought it was because he was afraid of Milton Feinberg, who had green eyes that could look as deep as Mrs. Quick’s; and then he thought to himself that he could not do it because the opportunity only came on Sunday mornings when, if he had never told that first lie, he should have been in church.