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Colophon

ALSO BY BAILEY WHITE

Mama Makes Up Her Mind

Sleeping at the Starlite Motel

Quite a Year for Plums

Title Page

Copyright

SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2008 by Bailey White

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2128-3
ISBN-10: 1-4391-2128-1

Dedication

For Linda

STORIES

Meals-On-Wheels

The Long Black Veil

What Would They Say in Birmingham?

The Progress of Deglutition

The Telephone Man

Miss Wigglesworth’s Bull

Bus Ride

Return to Sender

Lonesome Without You

The Garden

Nothing with Strings

The Green Bus

Almost Gone

Nothing with Strings

Meals-On-Wheels

IDA DIDN’T KNOW what to do in late September when the morning glories began taking over the living room. She had first noticed it in early July, just a little tendril nosing in between the screen and the window frame, but now a thicket of morning glories trailed along the picture molding and swagged down over the windows. “Heavenly Blue,” but the blossoms faded to a kind of purple and left exotic violet smears wherever they fell.

“Why don’t you just cut them off at the window and drag the vines away?” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “This purple will never wash out of your slipcovers.”

The Meals-On-Wheels girl irritated Ida sometimes with these thorough and practical suggestions. “Why don’t you just…” with the just implying that it would be the simplest thing in the world for any person of even the most meager intelligence, and only an old fool would not know what to do when Heavenly Blue morning glories came into the house and stained the furniture purple.