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from Brown Corpus
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And I'll take you with me.
Even if that's all the promise he ever gave or ever will give, the giving of it once was enough and you believed it then and you will always believe it, even when it is finally the only thing in the world you have left to believe, and the whole world is telling you that one was a lie.
Even when he is on the way to Memphis you will still have the promise resting inside you like a gift, and it is he inside of you.
And in a way the promise works out true, for whether he wants you or not, you go with him in your heart.
You feel him every mile further away.
You feel where he is and what he sees, and at night you feel when he is asleep or with the other woman, the one that never could love him the way you do, the one who got him because she didn't particularly give a damn whether she got him or didn't.
And you know you will always wonder all of your life whether it was because you wanted him so bad that you didn't get him, and you can feel nearly sorry enough to cry when you think of that other guy, the chump who begged you to marry him, the one with the plastered hair and the car he couldn't afford and the too-shiny shoes.
You think: `` Did he feel that way about me ''??
It comes to you that probably he did feel that way to let you use him like you did when you couldn't have Gratt Shafer ; ;
that he must have since he was there like the radio for you to turn on or snap off when you got tired of him, that other guy.
It dawns on you that instead of a lump to fill the seat across the bridge table from you, he was a man, and that because Gratt Shafer was making you miserable, you were passing it down to him, to Gratt Shafer's substitute, that other guy.
And you wonder if that is why the little man lost his job and his car and stayed drunk about a year before he straightened out and moved to St. Louis, where he got to be a big unhappy success.
You wonder if he looks at his wife now and thinks of you.
You wonder about the Christmas card with no name on it, and it comes to you that maybe it would have been better to have made somebody else happy if you couldn't be happy yourself, to give somebody else the one they wanted -- to give them you.

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