Written by Gina Malone – Old Alvin might have inherited $1,000 when his father finally died, or he might have inherited more. Townspeople speculated; no one knew for sure. Alvin could have gone about his business quietly while they wondered.

What he did instead was find a girl. People swore there were not women like that within 200 miles of Alston. She looked like something from the streets of L.A. with short shorts and thigh-high black boots. Hair shiny black and stick-straight. Nose pierced. Some people called her Asian, but that may have been the swoop of black liner at each eye’s outer corner.

“She was young enough to be his granddaughter,” said Mamie, who was working the register when they came into the Thrift Mart.

“Great-grand!” Pauline said. She had bagged their groceries.

Alvin did not put on a pin-striped suit or a jaunty hat or even shined-up shoes for his moment of glory. No, he strolled in, fingers laced with hers, wearing saggy denim overalls and muddy boots. It looked like he had just stepped out of the fields, driven to the big city, found her and said, “Let’s go get some bread and milk.”

He was not even smug about it. He just looked as he always did – tired, despondent, detached from these people he had seen his whole life, yet hardly knew at all.

“What’d he buy?” people asked Mamie and Pauline.

“Bread and milk,” they answered in unison.

“And bran cereal,” Mamie said.

“And a candy bar,” Pauline said. “For her.”

“Well she was little enough she could eat it,” Mamie said, with a trace of hostility. Pauline had a rear so large that people at the lane next to where she was bagging had to suck in to squeeze past.

“Why, Mamie, you sound like you approve of her!” Pauline narrowed her eyes. Ernie, the manager, had been warned that these two were reaching the end of their ability to have a cordial working relationship.

Mamie had thought Alvin’s show appalling, but now she tried on another viewpoint. “It ain’t no business of ours. The Bible says ‘Live and let live.’”

“The Bible does not say that,” Pauline countered. Her grandfather had been a minister. “The Bible says, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’”

“Well, that’s what you’re doing,” Mamie said. “You glared at that girl like she murdered your own mama.”

“Well, she needed to think about how she was living.”

“How do you know how – ?”

Ernie came over and sent Pauline on break, or who knows how that would have ended. They did not talk about it anymore, not even when people asked. They just shrugged their mouths, changed the subject and busied themselves with scanning and bagging.

No one ever saw the girl again. Alvin roamed about town as he always had – alone and close-mouthed.

Men shook their heads over the incident. “Blew his whole inheritance, I bet,” they would say with faraway eyes and wonder in their voices.