Had Johnny Gordon told her who’d torn his shirt and tossed him like a knotted rag against the wall, Rose would never have accepted George Burbank. But Johnny hadn’t said, feeling when you give a man a name you give him a face as well, and his humiliation was easier if the man was faceless, a force, like Fate. As she came to enjoy George’s quiet company—even to look forward to it—she rationalized the incident of the paper flowers. Maybe Mr. Phil Burbank had meant nothing. For what grown man would humiliate a boy? Was she too sensitive, too quick to remember old taunts in the schoolyard, to
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