Free Sweet Dream Baby by Sterling Watson

a cash register and a gun rack with some rifles and shotguns and boxes of shells.
    A man in a white apron and a white garrison cap smiles at my Aunt Delia and puts both hands on the marble counter and leans toward us. He says, “Hey there, Miss Delia, what can I do for you today?”
    There are two boys in one of the booths, and one of them giggles and makes his voice high, and sings, “Hey there, Miss Delia.”
    I can feel my Aunt Delia go hard beside me, and she lifts her chin a little, and she’s not walking so loose and wavy as we go to the counter.
    She slides onto a stool, and pats the one next to her, and I take it. The boy giggles again, and the man across the counter says, “Behave yourself, Sifford, or you’ll not be scarfing milkshakes in here for a month.”
    He looks at Delia and smiles, and she smiles, but her smile is small and thin. She says, “Mr. Tolbert, I want to introduce my nephew, Travis, from Omaha. He’s here to spend the summer with us.”
    Mr. Tolbert has a big, tanned, square face with pale blue eyes and a blue jaw like my dad’s. He’s got forearms like the business end of a baseball bat, and they’ve got thick black hair on them. A long scar starts over his left eye and goes up into his hair, and I wonder if it’s from the war. He smiles at me, and we shake hands and he says, “You’re Lloyd’s boy, aren’t you?”
    I nod and smile and remember to say, “Yes, sir.”
    Mr. Tolbert looks past me at the front windows where the light comes in through the green glass, and I know he’s looking at the far away like my dad does. He says, “Your daddy’s one heck of a man, son. I’m proud to have you in my establishment.” I don’t know what he means. Maybe it’s the war, the things my dad won’t talk about. Maybe it’s the things my Grandma Hollister told me about in the car on the way from the airport. Scholarships and running the hundred so fast.
    There’s another giggle from the booth behind us, and the boy makes his voice as high as a girl’s. “Poor Travis, stuck in Widow Rock for a whole summer. That boy’s gone lose his mind.”
    My Aunt Delia turns around, and I turn, too, and it’s fun to spin on the stool, and I look at my Aunt Delia, and she’s got that small, tight smile on her face. She says, “Travis, I want you to meet two scoundrel dog boys. That one with the ugly red hair and the big ears is Ronny Bishop. The conceited one with the funny voice is Bickley P. Sifford. Bick for short. He’s conceited because he thinks he’s cute, and because his daddy owns the box factory and he’s accepted to Princeton. But you know what I think, Travis?”
    My Aunt Delia stops and looks at me. The two boys watch us, grinning. They look just like my Aunt Delia said. Red hair, big ears. Conceited and cute. But there’s more to both of them. The one called Ronny is as big as a man, and his neck fills his button-down shirt collar too tight, and his eyes are small and pale blue and seem to aim at you through the field of freckles on his cheeks. The one called Bick is tall and muscular, too, but he’s blond, and at first he reminds me of Tab Hunter. But he’s not that cute. There’s just something unreal about him, especially sitting across from the other boy. He looks like he knows he could say something that would change everything here. He looks important.
    The boys are waiting for me to ask, “What?” I can’t see him, but I know Mr. Tolbert is waiting behind the counter, too. So I say, “What?”
    My Aunt Delia says, “I think he’s going to get up there at Princeton with all the other boys, and their daddies are gonna own even bigger box factories, and they’re gonna be even cuter and even more conceited, and our Mr. Bickley P. Sifford is going to have him a comeuppance.”
    Mr. Tolbert laughs