Weep for Me Read Free Page A

that June day.
    I went down and put my hat back on. Bankers wear hats. Grinter was still sweating it out. I went out the side door and looked across the street. There was a soda fountain there. Through the window I could see the end stool. It was empty. If I took that stool, I could see Emily Rudolph come out. I could pretend it was an accident when I met her on the street. And suddenly the very intensity of my desire to know more about her frightened me. I turned on my heel and walked the five blocks to my apartment. It was Wednesday. Wednesdays and Sundays I had dinner with Jo Anne and her folks. They liked me to be on time. I showered and changed and caught a Number 7 bus out to the familiar Clark Street corner.

Chapter Two
    I walked up the four wooden steps onto Jo Anne’s porch. The front door was open and I rapped on the screen at almost exactly five-thirty.
    Mrs. Lane called from the kitchen, “That you, Kyle? Come right in.”
    I went on into the living room. Ed Lane, Jo Anne’s father, was reading the evening paper. He’s a little round bald-headed guy who works for the railroad, doing something or other in the traffic division.
    He beamed at me. “How’s it go, Kyle? Any of that stuff stick to your fingers today?”
    I laughed no more and no less than I had laughed a thousand times before. When he gets a joke, he sticks with it.
    So I gave my usual answer. “Someday they’ll stop searching me when I leave.”
    “How does that porch furniture look to you, Kyle?”
    I turned and stared through the windows. “Say! Looks fine. I didn’t even notice it. I thought you were going to wait until I could help you paint it.”
    “Got ambitious Monday night.”
    “It sure looks dandy,” I said. I went on into the kitchen, kissed Mrs. Lane on the cheek, and said, “Hi, Mom.” It took me a long time to get used to calling her that, the way Jo Anne does. I call her father Ed.
    “Poor Jo Anne,” she said. “They turned on the airconditioning in her office today. She’s got the sniffles.”
    She was at the stove. I leaned against the sink and lowered my voice so Ed couldn’t hear. “How about your health, Mom? Did you make that appointment today?”
    “Now, don’t start that again, Kyle. I’m a perfectly healthy woman.”
    Both Jo Anne and I were worried about her. Ed didn’t seem to notice it, but she had grown gaunt in the past year. And you could see something in her eyes. Like in the photograph that is published after somebody is dead.
    “Mom, you’ll go get a checkup if I have to take the day off to take you.”
    “Ssh,” she said.
    “I mean it.”
    “All right, all right. I’ll make an appointment tomorrow.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.”
    I heard Jo Anne coming down the stairs. She came into the kitchen. As I went to kiss her she turned her head aside. “This is a cold you don’t want, honey,” she said.
    I took a good look at her. The end of her nose was red and her eyes looked puffy. But she certainly looked pretty. A fluff-headed blonde, with blue eyes, a firm cleft chin, a bouncy, abundant, slim-waisted little body. She was always talking about diets and looking ruefully at her hips in full-length mirrors, but I kept telling her that I liked her just the way she was. I had a hunch that by the time she was forty she’d be just as round as her old man.
    “Feel bad, darling?” I asked her.
    “Biserable,” she said with a loud snuffle. “Dab airconditioning!”
    “Don’t swear, dear,” Mom said comfortably. “It sounds like hell.”
    When dinner was almost ready, three phone calls—less than the usual number—rounded up Daphne, the kid sister, and she came panting home on her bike, full of the usual excuses. It didn’t take any psychologist to see that Daphne, at fifteen, gave much promise of being quite a handful. She was a silver blonde with sharp cheekbones and a breathless manner. And already she knew how to use her eyes. I was a stuffy old bank person, to her, but a