She stayed downstairs maybe half an hour and then she went up again and I didn't see them any more that night.

My old man gets up and does the breakfasts, if there are any to do. That's about all he does for me, because then he starts with his drinking and is no good to me the rest of the day. So, when I got up that day he tells me that he made a breakfast for the little one, but the big one has paid him a dollar for a drink of his private whiskey. I yell at him and say he has no license to sell whiskey and we're going to get into trouble. And besides, this girl should eat in the morning, not drink. But he shrugs his shoulders and says he knows how she feels and can he make her eat if she doesn't want to?

They had already gone to the beach, so it was past lunch time before I saw them again. Funny how it struck me, all of a sudden, watching them come in the door together, that they were an odd kind of pair. I don't mean that there was anything wrong with either of them. They were both nice-looking girls, except the big one, Ron, looked like people get to look when they drink too much you know, bad around the eyes and so on. (My old man has looked this way for so long I can't even remember how he looked in the beginning.)

But what I mean is, these two girls were so different from each other. Like in the way you expect a man and a woman to be different from each other. but not two girls who are such good friends. I have lots of pairs of girls come down and rent rooms from me, and maybe one is fat and one is skinny, or one is blonde-haired and one is dark. But somehow they are the same kind of girlsgirly girls, and it just struck me that something is different about these two. The little one, Jane, she is a girly girl all right, with sort of long, curly hairbut Ron seems more like a man to me. Her hair isn't like a man's, and she always has her lipstick on and her fingernails painted. But, I don't know. And maybe its the way Jane acts to Ron, too. She seems to kind of look after her. She worries about her, too, I can see that. When we were talking last night, while Ron was sleeping, Jane didn't talk much about herself, but she told me a lot about Ron. About what a wonderful airplane pilot she is and all the places she has been and things she has done. How she was in the war and flew those big planes from the factories where they were made and so on.

"But how can she fly planes when she drinks so much?" I asked. "Oh, she doesn't drink when she is flying," Jane said. Then she told me that Ron had been sick for a long time, more than a year.

"And you take care of her?" I said. Jane must have thought I meant about money, because real quick she said, "Oh, Ron is all right, financially,-I don't..." But I interrupted. "No, I mean you, what word do I want? Nurse her, sort of..."

"Well, yes, as much as I can. But for her kind of sickness. . . ." Jane's voice went low and she stopped, and I told her with my eyes that I knew what she

meant.

Anyway, this day they came in from the beach around two in the afternoon, and it was the same thing again. The soda or tomato juice, I don't remember which, and Ron pouring from the bottle and not eating anything. When I went to their table they asked me if they could have the room for another night. I didn't have anybody coming down, so I said I would be happy if they would stay. Then the little one said she must call her office and see if they could spare her one more day.

By this time I feel like I know these girls well, and I said to Ron, while

one

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