Milton and his sister, Sarah Feinberg, liked him. He could tell it by the way Sarah Feinberg always called him up to her office to clean. There were always rolls of coins on her desk, and scattered small change on the floor when he swept. But he never touched any of it. Instead, he would gather what was on the floor and stack the coins very neatly on her desk. And when she came back into the office after he had swept and mopped and waxed and dusted and emptied her wastebaskets, Sarah Feinberg would smile at Thomas from behind her little glasses and say: “You’re a good boy, Tommy.”

He could tell that Milton Feinberg liked him because whenever he went to the bank for money he would always ask Thomas to come out to the car to help him bring the heavy white sacks into the store, and sometimes up to his office. On one occasion, he had picked Thomas up on the street, after school, when Thomas was running in order to get to work on time. Milton Feinberg had driven him to the store.

“I like you,” Milton Feinberg told Thomas. “You’re a good worker.”

Thomas could think of nothing to say.

“When you quit school, there’ll be a place in the store for you.”

“I ain’t gonna quit school,” Thomas had said.

Milton Feinberg smiled and chewed on his green cigar. “Well, when you finish high school you can come on to work full-time. Miss Hester says you’re a good worker.”

“Bagging potatoes is easy,” said Thomas.

Milton Feinberg smiled again as he drove the car. “Well, we can get you in the stockroom, if you can handle it. Think you can handle it?”

“Yeah,” said Thomas. But he was not thinking of the stockroom and unloading trucks and stacking cases of canned goods and soap in the big, musty upstairs store-room. He was thinking of how far away he was from finishing high school and how little that long time seemed to matter to Milton Feinberg.

V

THOMAS WAS EXAMINING a very ugly man from behind his window one afternoon when Miss Hester came into the produce room from the front of the store. As usual, she stood behind him. Thomas was aware of her eyes on his back. He could feel them on his shoulders as he pushed potatoes into the plastic bags. Miss Hester was silent. And Thomas went on with his work and watching the very ugly man. This man was bald and had a long, thin red nose that twisted down unnaturally, almost to the same level as his lower lip. The man had no chin, but only three layers of skin that lapped down onto his neck like a red cloth necklace. Harry Jackson, one of the stock clerks who occasionally passed through the produce room to steal an apple or a banana, had christened the very ugly man “Do-funny,” just as he had christened Thomas “Little Brother” soon after he had come to the job when he was thirteen. Looking at Do-funny made Thomas sad: he wondered how the man had lost his chin. Perhaps, he thought, Do had lost it in the war, or perhaps in a car accident. He was trying to picture just how Do-funny would look after the accident when he realized that his chin was gone forever, when Miss Hester spoke from behind him.