Bud
Copyright© 2015 by Bill Offutt
Chapter 13
Bud's first memories were of his father's old general store on Rockville Pike. He could recall the smell of the place and still knew the layout of the shelves and remembered the metallic sound of the hand-cranked cash register and the smack of the screened door.
He was unsure whether or not he really remembered being in a playpen behind the counter, but he had heard the story of his early ability to escape from his wood-slat cage so often, that he thought he might. He even remembered the nameless cat that seemed to sleep all day on the windowsill.
Even before he went to school, like his sister Janie and his brother Philip, he worked in the store on a regular basis, learned to make change and to be polite and helpful. His Aunt Jenny's boys, Paul and Mike, had always seemed like grown-ups to him since they were finishing high school when he was just entering kindergarten.
At the store, Bud was a hard worker but never mastered the ability to total up a customer's order once he had filled it, and he had some trouble writing numbers properly on the brown paper bags, often making them more or less backwards.
Bud was seven when the streetcars stopped running on the line that lay behind his home so he received most of his early schooling in Kensington and rode a school bus back and forth from Garrett Park. Except in the worst weather, when his mother would keep him home and find him things to read in the Saturday Evening Post or chores to do, he walked the two miles cross country to the bus stop starting when he was eight.
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