CHAPTER THREE SUGAR
CHAPTER
THREE
Sugar
Benny sat at his kitchen table hunched over Elements of Automobile Engineering, his notes scattered across the table, when a strong knocking startled him out of his concentration.
He opened his door to find Gloria. He hadn’t seen her since the night of the Joe Louis fight.
She wore a yellow dress and a bright smile and held an empty cup.
‘Hi,’ he said, smoothing his hair, tucking his shirt in.
‘Hi, yourself.’ She held up the cup. ‘I’ve come for sugar. Half a cup exactly. Do you have any?’
He remembered how refreshingly direct she was and felt pleased she’d come to him when they were surrounded by neighbors with sugar. ‘I think so. Come on in. I’ll take a look.’
‘Alice is making a Key lime pie,’ she said, stepping inside.
‘And wouldn’t you know it, we’re short of sugar.
’ She followed him into the kitchen. ‘Alice makes the best pies. I can never get the crust to work out right. But I bake a mean cake.’ She raised her eyebrows at Benny. ‘Are you a pie man or a cake man?’
‘Me? I like, well, both, but I mean, I think I prefer cake.’
This, too, Benny remembered. Feeling backfooted in her presence. He liked it. He rummaged in his cupboard and pulled out a paper sack of sugar folded over and clipped shut with a clothes peg.
‘Goodness, this looks complicated,’ she said, flipping through the book he’d left open on the table.
‘It’s not so bad.’
‘Are you on one of those training courses?’
He nodded, filling her cup.
‘I told Ed he should go on one of those, but nothing doing. Daddy wants to give him the business, but he says he just doesn’t have a head for figures. Daddy says I should have been the boy since numbers come so easy to me. During the war, I practically ran his office.’
‘Why not give it to you?’
She fluffed her skirts. ‘I’m a girl, Benny. He’s not going to give his big, manly business to his little girl.’ She laughed, but he heard the frustration underneath it. ‘I could do it, but he doesn’t see me that way.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s a heck of a thing when you know you’ve got more in you than other people see,’ Benny said.
She tilted her head at him and squinted, like she was trying to peel back the layers of him. ‘Ed would say I don’t know how easy I’ve got it.’
Benny shook his head. ‘If you have wings to fly, it’s not easier to crawl.’
He handed her back the cup, but she didn’t move to go.
‘You are the first man who gets that. Why don’t other people?’
Benny reddened, cautious now, careful not to give too much away. ‘I guess I just have a different perspective.’ He dug his hands into his pockets.
‘I never studied accounting properly, but I learned everything from my father, and I’m good at it. I’m really good at it.’
‘Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t?’
When he shook his head, she beamed. ‘Come to dinner,’ she said. ‘Alice is making meat loaf and mashed potatoes.’
He bit his lip. ‘Thanks, but I don’t think—’
‘It’s not like you have anything on the stove,’ she said, waving her hand around his kitchen. ‘Besides, it’s Key lime pie for dessert, and you like pie almost as much as you like cake.’ She held up the sugar. ‘Plus, you contributed to the meal.’
Half an hour later, when he’d changed his shirt four times, Ed knocked on his door to fetch him for dinner.
‘You sure I’m not intruding?’ Benny said.
‘No backing out now. Alice has already set a place for you, and Glory would kill me if I came back empty-handed.’
Benny shut off his lights and followed Ed out.
‘Listen, before we go over there, I just want to be straight with you,’ Ed said, stopping them on Benny’s front lawn.
‘My sister’s a great girl with a big heart, and it looks like she’s taken a shine to you.
Now, I’m not saying that if you have dinner with us, you’re going to have to marry her or anything, but I am saying, don’t lead her on. I don’t want to see her getting hurt.’
Benny stepped back and put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I just met her, Ed. I barely know her. All I can say is, she seems, I don’t know, special?’
Ed nodded. ‘Special’s good. And I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I just need you to know she has people watching out for her.’
‘Okay,’ Benny said, a sinking feeling in his gut.
‘Come on.’ Ed slung an arm around his shoulders. ‘Let’s eat some meat loaf.’