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that she showed this illness most plainly. One Sunday, when
she wrote out the day’s menu on the typewriter, she marked
the special dinner with chicken a la king at twenty cents
instead of fifty, and did not discover the mistake until several
customers had already ordered and were ready to pay. Another
time she gave back two fives and three ones as change for ten
dollars. Biff would stand looking at her for a long time,ugg store,
rubbing his nose thoughtfully and with his eyes half-closed.
They did not speak of this together. At night he worked
downstairs while she slept, and during the morning she
managed the restaurant alone. When they worked together he
stayed behind the cash register and looked after the kitchen
and the tables, as was their custom. They did not talk except
on matters of business,cheap ugg boots, but Biff would stand watching her
with his face puzzled.
Then in the afternoon of the eighth of October there was a
sudden cry of pain from the room where they slept. Biff
hurried upstairs. Within an hour they had taken Alice to the
hospital and the doctor had removed from her a tumor almost
the size of a newborn child. And then within another hour
Alice was dead.
Biff sat by her bed at the hospital in stunned reflection. He
had been present when she died. Her eyes had been drugged
and misty from the ether and then they hardened like glass.
The nurse and the doctor withdrew from the room. He
continued to look into her face. Except for the bluish pallor
there was little difference. He noted each detail about her as
though he had net watched her every day for twenty-one years.
Then gradually as he sat there his thoughts turned to a picture
that had long been stored inside him.
The cold green ocean and a hot gold strip of sand. The little
children playing on the edge of the silky line of foam. The
sturdy brown baby girl, the thin little naked boys, the half-
grown children running and calling out to each other104
with sweet, shrill voices. Children were here whom he knew,
Mick and his niece, Baby, and there were also strange young
faces no one had ever seen before. Biff bowed his head.
After a long while he got up from his chair and stood in the
middle of the room. He could hear his sister-in-law, Lucile,
walking up and down the hall outside. A fat bee crawled
across the top of the dresser, and adroitly Biff caught it in his
hand and put it out the open window. He glanced at the dead
face one more time,cheap ugg boots, and then with widowed sedateness he
opened the door mat led out into the hospital corridor.
Late the next morning he sat sewing in the room upstairs.
Why? Why was it that in cases of real love the one who is left
does not more often follow the beloved by suicide? Only
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