Friend of My Youth

oor and they squirted ketchup at him. Nobody cared. The daytime customers—the
housewives buying bakery goods and the pensioners killing time with a coee—never
came in at night. The mother and Lisa had gone home on the bus, to wherever they
lived. Then even the father started going home, a little after suppertime. Maria was left
in charge. She didn’t care what they did, as long as they didn’t do damage and as long
as they paid.
This was the world of drugs that belonged to the older boys, that they kept the
younger boys out of. It was a while before they noticed that the younger ones had
something, too. They had some secret of their own. They were growing insolent and
self-important. Some of them were always pestering the older boys to let them buy
drugs. That was how it became evident that they had quite a bit of unexplained money.
Neil had—he has—a younger brother named Jonathan. Very straight now, married, a
teacher. Jonathan began dropping hints; other boys did the same thing, they couldn’t
keep the secret to themselves, and pretty soon it was all out in the open. They were
getting their money from Maria. Maria was paying them to have sex with her. They did
it in the back shed after she closed the store up at night. She had the key to the shed.
She also had the day-to-day control of the money. She emptied the till at night, she
kept the books. Her parents trusted her to do this. Why not She was good at arithmetic,
and she was devoted to the business. She understood the whole operation better than
they did. It seemed that they were very uncertain and superstitious about money, and
they did not want to put it in the bank. They kept it in a safe or maybe just a strongbox
somewhere, and got it as they needed it. They must have felt they couldn’t trust
anybody, banks or anybody, outside of the family. What a godsend Maria must have
seemed to them—steady and smart, not pretty enough to be tempted to put her hopes or
energies into anything but the business. A pillar, Maria.
She was a head taller and thirty or forty pounds heavier than those boys she paid.
There are always a few bad moments after Brenda turns off the highway—where she has
some excuse to be driving, should anyone see her—and onto the side road. The van is
noticeable, unmistakable. But once she has taken the plunge, driving where she
shouldn’t be, she feels stronger. When she turns onto the dead-end swamp road, there’s
no excuse possible. Spotted here, she’s nished. She has about half a mile to drive out in
the open before she gets to the trees. She’d hoped that they would plant corn, which
would grow tall and shelter her, but they hadn’t, they’d planted beans. At least the
roadsides here hadn’t been sprayed; the grass and weeds and berry bushes had grown
tall, though not tall enough to hide a van. There was goldenrod and milkweed, with the
pods burst open, and dangling bunches of bright, poisonous fruit, and wild grapevine
ung over everything, even creeping onto the road. And nally she was in, she was into
the tunnel of trees. Cedar, hemlock, farther back in the wetter ground the wispy-looking
tamarack, lots of soft maples with leaves spotty yellow and brown. No standing water,
no black pools, even far back in the trees. They’d had luck, with the dry summer and
fall. She and Neil had had luck, not the farmers. If it had been a wet year, they could