So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs. Bentley's front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs. Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends.
"How old are you, Mrs. Bentley?"
"Seventy-two."
"How old were you fifty years ago?"
"Seventy-two."
"You weren't ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?"
"No."
"Have you got a first name?"
"My name is Mrs. Bentley."
"And you've always lived in this one house?"
"Always."
"And never were pretty?"
"Never."
"Never in a million trillion years?" The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o'clock on a summer afternoon.
"Never," said Mrs. Bentley, "in a million trillion years."
You got the nickel tablet ready, Doug?"
"Sure." Doug licked his pencil good.
"What you got in there so far?"
"All the ceremonies."
"July Fourth and all that, dandelion-wine making and junk like bringing out the porch swing, huh?"
"Says here, I ate the first Eskimo Pie of the summer season June first, 1928."
"That wasn't summer, that was still spring."
"It was a 'first' anyway, so I put it down. Bought those new tennis shoes June twenty-fifth. Went barefoot in the grass June twenty-sixth. Busy, busy, busy, heck! Well, what you got to report this time, Tom? A new first, a fancy ceremony of some sort to do with vacation like creek-crab catching or water-strider-spider grabbing?"
"Nobody ever grabbed a water-strider-spider in his life. You ever know anybody grabbed a water-strider-spider? Go ahead, think!"
"I'm thinking."
"Well?"
"You're right. Nobody ever did. Nobody ever will, I guess. They're just too fast."
"It's not that they're fast. They just don't exist," said Tom. He thought about it and nodded. "That's right, they just never did exist at all. Well, what I got to report is this."
He leaned over and whispered in his brother's ear.
Douglas wrote it.