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In the morning, Candy sent Angel to the cider house to inquire if Rose Rose needed anything for the baby, and that was when Angel fell in love. He was shy with girls his own age; boys his own age, and a little older, always teased him about his name. He thought he was the only Angel in Maine. He was even shy in advance of meeting girls, anticipating when he would have to tell them his name. In Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven, the prettier, more confident girls in his class ignored him; they were interested in the older boys. The girls who appeared to like him were plain, sullen gossips who most enjoyed talking to other girls like themselves, about themselves--or about which boys had said what to whom. Every time Angel spoke to a girl, he knew his remarks were relayed that evening over the telephone to every other neglected girl in his class. The following morning, they would all smirk at him--as if he'd said the same, foolish thing to each of them. And so he learned to keep quiet. He watched the older girls in school; he approved of the ones who did the least amount of talking to their girlfriends. They struck him as more mature, by which he meant that they were actually doing things they would not want their girlfriends to know.
In 195_, girls Angel's age looked forward to dating; boys Angel's age--as in other times--looked forward to doing things.
Mr. Rose's daughter was not only the most exotic young woman Angel had ever seen; if she had a daughter, she must also have done things.
It was cold and damp in the cider house in the mornings; when Angel arrived there, Rose Rose was outside, in the sun, washing Baby Rose in a bucket. The baby was splashing, and Rose Rose was talking to her daughter; she didn't hear Angel walking up to her. Perhaps--since Angel had been brought up more by his father than by his mother--Angel was predisposed to be attracted to a Madonna scene. Rose Rose was only a few years older than Angel--she was so young that her maternity was startling. When she was with her baby, her gestures and her expressions were womanly, and she had a full, womanly figure. She was a little taller than Angel. She had a round, boyish face.
"Good morning," Angel said, startling Baby Rose in the bucket. Rose Rose wrapped her daughter in a towel and stood up.
"You must be Angel," she said shyly. She had a fine scar that sliced across the flange of one nostril and her upper lip; it made a nick in her gum, which Angel could see when she parted her lips. Later, he would see that the knife had stopped at the eyetooth and removed it, which accounted for her only partial smile. She would explain to him that the wound had killed the root of the tooth and that the tooth had fallen out later. He was so smitten when he first met her that even the scar was beautiful to him; it was her only apparent flaw.
"I wondered if I could help you get anything for the baby," Angel said.
"She seem to be teethin'," Rose Rose reported on her daughter. "She kind of cranky today."
Mr. Rose came out of the cider house; when he saw Angel, he waved and smiled, and then he walked over and put his arm around the boy. "How you doin'?" he asked. "You still growin', I think. I used to carry him on top of my head," he told Rose Rose. "He used to grab them apples I couldn't reach," Mr. Rose explained, punching Angel affectionately on the arm.
"I'm counting on growing a little more," Angel said--for Rose Rose's benefit. He wouldn't want her to think he had stopped growing; he wanted her to know that he would be taller than she, one day.
He wished he'd worn a shirt; it was not that he wasn't muscular, it was somehow more grown-up to wear a shirt. Then he imagined that she might approve of his summer tan, and so he relaxed about not having a shirt; he put his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans, and he wished he'd worn his baseball cap. It was a Boston Red Sox cap, and he had to get hold of it first thing in the morning if he was going to wear it--otherwise, Candy would wea
r it. They had been meaning to buy another baseball cap for two summers now; Candy owed him one because she'd admitted to tearing one of the sweat holes in the cap by poking a pencil through it.
Candy worked as a checker during the harvest, and she needed her pencil. This would be the second harvest that Angel would be a checker, and the second summer that he got to drive one of the tractors that hauled the apples out of the orchards.
When Angel told his father that Rose Rose's baby was teething, Homer knew what to do. He sent Angel (with Wally) to town to buy some pacifiers, and then he sent Angel back to the cider house with a package of pacifiers and a fifth of bourbon; Wally drank a very little bourbon from time to time, and the bottle was three-quarters full. Homer showed Angel how to dab whiskey on Baby Rose's gums.
"It numbs the gums," Angel explained to Rose Rose. He dipped his pinky finger in the whiskey, then he stuck his finger in Baby Rose's tiny mouth. At first, he was afraid he'd gag the baby girl, whose eyes instantly grew large and watery at the bourbon fumes; but then Baby Rose went to work on Angel's finger so ferociously that when he removed his finger to apply more bourbon, the baby cried to have the finger back.
"You gonna make her drunk," Rose Rose warned.
"No, I won't," Angel assured her. "I'm just putting her gums to sleep."
Rose Rose examined the pacifiers. They were rubber nipples, like the nipple on a baby's bottle, but without the hole and attached to a baby-blue plastic ring that was too big to swallow. The problem with using a regular bottle nipple, Angel Wells explained, was that the baby would keep sucking in air through the hole, and the air would give the baby burping fits or a gassy stomach.
"How come you know so much?" Rose Rose asked Angel, smiling. "How old are you?"
"I'm almost sixteen," Angel said. "How old are you?"
" 'Bout your age," she told him.
In the afternoon, when Angel came back to the cider house to see how the teething was going, Baby Rose was not the only Rose with a pacifier stuck in her mouth. Mr. Rose was sitting on the cider house roof, and Angel could see--from a considerable distance, because of the unreal, baby-blue hue of the plastic ring--that he had a pacifier in his mouth.
"Are you teething, too?" Angel called up to him. Mr. Rose removed the pacifier from his mouth slowly--the way he did everything.
"I'm cuttin' out smokin'," said Mr. Rose. "You got a nipple in your mouth all day, who needs a cigarette?" He stuck the pacifier back in his mouth and grinned at Angel broadly.
In the cider house, Baby Rose had fallen asleep with a pacifier in her mouth and Angel surprised Rose Rose as she was washing her hair. She was bent over the kitchen sink with her back to him; he couldn't see her breasts, although she was bare from the waist up.
"Is that you?" she asked ambiguously, keeping her back turned to him--but not jumping to cover herself.
"Sorry," Angel said, stepping back outside. "I should have knocked." Then she jumped and covered herself, her hair still soapy; she must have thought it was her father.
"I was checking on how the teething was going," Angel explained.
"It goin' fine," Rose Rose said. "You a good doctor. You my hero, for today." She was smiling her partial smile.
A stream of bright suds from the shampoo ran around her neck and down her chest, over her arms, which she'd folded, with a towel, across her unseen breasts. Angel Wells, smiling, backed so far away from the cider house door that he bumped into the old car, which was parked close enough against the cider house to appear to be helping hold the building up. He heard a tiny pebble come rolling down the cider house roof, but when it hit him on the head--even though he'd had time to steal the baseball cap away from Candy and now wore it at a casual angle, with the visor shading his forehead--the pebble hurt. He looked up at Mr. Rose, who had rolled the pebble in his direction--a perfect shot.
