Chin Up, Honey. Curtiss Matlock Ann

peered at the paper. “No one’ll notice.”

      “My mother will,” said Emma. “But maybe no one else. Their picture just captures attention.” She grinned at the teenage girl. “Johnny is just so cute.”

      “Yeah, he is,” said Paris, grinning back.

      Emma took up four copies of the paper and headed out the door, then came back and got two more.

      Paris waved as the woman left. She wished that she had a mother who thought as much of her as Mrs. Berry thought of Johnny. For an instant, in which she blinked hard and looked downward, she wondered what having such a mother would be like.

      Paris’s mother had left her years before, just gone off and left Paris, who had not yet turned ten at the time. Not even knowing who her father was, Paris lived with her grandfather, a Vietnam vet who was in a wheelchair. Because she was only fifteen now, she’d had to talk Johnny Berry into giving her the job at the Quick Stop, and it was only part-time for the summer. But Johnny had already given her a raise and said she did a real good job. It was a start on her goal to pull herself and her grandfather up out of poverty of the sort where that little thief probably came from, by the look of him.