In the moment that it took for her to turn quickly away from the candy store counter, the invading memories had taken their prisoner: Ellen was again nine years old, waiting for the Wades to arrive, all that long, hot Sunday afternoon.
Her Sunday school dress showed grass stains now, and she had forgotten where she had shed the black patent shoes, but it was her stomach, persistently rumbling its hunger, that dominated her attention. The Wades had been due for dinner at one o’clock and it was now past three; Ellen had nothing to eat since this morning when she and Mother had returned from church to be greeted by Father, still in his robe and whiskers.
           Father was handsome now in his short-sleeved white shirt, and he lay in the porch swing, reading the Sunday paper, one tan arm reaching for the thick glass mug of beer.  As Mother came out on the porch with an apron over her good dress, looking anxious and fretting about her ruined roast, Father murmured something about “busy with the moving” in a slow voice, without looking up, and Mother’s face looked suddenly sad.  Ellen studied her toes; Rose Wade had been Mother’s closest friend since grammar school, and soon she and Leo and ten-year-old Gary would be living in another small town eighty miles away.
            When the familiar blue Ford finally arrived and emptied, the Wades toiled up the huge, sloping lawn, led by Gary, chubby and perspiring, who shyly handed Ellen a brown paper bag with tempting black licorice sticks poking out the top; next came his mother in a frilly dress and scented talc, and then the square, heavy-stepping Mr. Wade. On the porch, Ellen’s mother hugged Rose Wade, and Father’s white teeth flashed as the men shook hands. Mother apologized and apologized as if it were her fault that everyone would have to wait while she reheated the dinner, Rose Wade bubbled that she wanted to see Mother’s flower garden, and Leo Wade took the beer that Father gave him and a part of Father’s paper and disappeared into the coolness of the house.
             The bag of licorice was gone by the time the silver clattered in the dining room, and Ellen was sent running into the garden with the message that dinner was ready. For one long, uncomprehending moment, she stood as still as they, Father and Rose Wade, hidden in the deep shade of the old oak, tightly embraced, faces buried, and then she fled, noiselessly, over the thick grass. And there, huddled by Mother’s rosebushes, wanting to cry so much that it hurt to take a breath, Ellen was sick, violently, unceasingly sick.
In time, Ellen stopped being “a problem,” and the worried lines smoothed out of Mother’s forehead. Eventually, that Sunday afternoon had never been, except when it came now, like a swift blow to the stomach, upon seeing the shining glass jar of licorice which—with one quick push—went smashing, until glossy black licorice sticks lay twisting all over the spotless floor of Blimm’s Candy Store.