Mr. Howard Hobbs readied the storefront for opening: shovels in line next to rakes and hoes; canning jars, seals and lids on the shelves just under the pectin and sugar, apples, the weak red and yellow kind, piled in baskets to haul outside to the porch. Down the block, where the 25 mph sign slowed traffic a tad, the Markelson brothers arrived, Joe dropping off Ted, Ted hosing off gas pump lanes before he ever unlocks and goes inside, Joe leaned out the window, them talking and nodding about what only God knew, and not even God would care. When Joe drove past on his way to wherever, he waved at Mr. Hobbs; one of those fingertips to the hat brim neighborly nods. Mr. Hobbs never waved back at either one of those boys. He had a basket of apples in hand, but he wouldn’t have waved. Never did before. Couldn’t see the need now.
Joe, the younger Markelson boy, honked and Mr. Hobbs told the apples “Yeah, I’d wear a hat too if I was as bald as all that. No offense to you apples, but you’ve got more fuzz on your skins than that boy does.” Ted and Joe Markelson had been running the Gas-M-Up Lucky Mart and Convenience Store since the day it opened in 1972, but that didn’t make them natives to this part of the country. And it sure didn’t make them “men.”
This part of the country was Alice, population 204. And Howard Hobbs had something to do with that, the town name, not the population. When he thought about that, which he didn’t, he could partially see how all of his troubled days crawled out of that one sack of facts – no sons, no daughters, just hard work and Alice. Any one of them (Alice, Howard, Bob, or Teensy) would set it up differently, the “it” being the “how” of the two sister towns, or the “why” of them. The Markelson brothers heard it this way:
Alice and Teensy Bitt wed Howard and Bob Hobbs in late 1941. Wars tend to make weddings come about faster than they might otherwise. Bob had been seeing Teensy for a time. She was pretty. He was Navy. She was a regular at the Canteen. She had a sister. He had a cousin . . . Howard. All four said “I do” before a Justice of the Peace in Lincoln. Getting married seemed the right thing. War tends to decrease the amount of time spent considering such big steps in life.
Howard was Navy, too, and they, the cousins, shipped out of Long Beach, California, where the Bitt Sisters, now the Hobbs Sisters, waved them good-bye, together.
The girls, before marriage, were the honey-haired “Bitt Sisters.” Alice, the younger, told Howard once about how she had mixed feelings-her name not being “Little” or “Tiny” or something clever like Teensy’s name was, but she was born in more serious times than Teensy. Grandma Alice had died that same year, and Alice was what she got.
What Bob got over in the Pacific Theater was an empty sleeve and silver star. Howard came home without a scratch or a medal but he was twitchier, less at ease, more impatient than the sailor Alice recalled. Of course, they’d all been not much more than strangers who’d shared a dance floor more than once. The men were still men, still cousins, still wed to sisters, and beyond ready to get on with making some good out of their lives. They headed west out of Lincoln.
Now, the long and the short of it is just this: not five years down the road, the Hobbs’s had a falling out. Might’ve been bitterness on Bob’s part about his empty sleeve and Howard having two good arms and hands. Might’ve been Howard’s accidental stumbling upon Bob and Alice up to no good in the cornfield. But once the milk sours, it’s sour, and there’s no bringing it back to sweetness.
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