' In our wallets, in our pockets, the draft cards weighed nothing at all; we never looked at them. How many times I asked her to tell me that story! And she never hesitated, she never lacked enthusiasm for telling that story-which she told the same way, every time. Meany went ahead with the rest of the day's heavy business. We drove out Court Street, and the entire length of Pine Street, with the trees blowing overhead and the granite dust stinging our faces on the flatbed.
But there was no turning him off; he just babbled on and on. At age eleven, I was too young to glimpse a vision of what sort of overwrought wife and mother Mary Beth Baird would ma in the sly or stealthy sense of that word, but in the word's other catlike qualities: a clean, sleek, self-possessed, strokable quality. And the girls, who rarely returned our glances when we were secure in the Meany Granite Company pickup, took very long (and giggling) looks at Owen when we were on foot.
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