"Well, he's got no shrinks in his family, anyway," said DeAnne.
"So," said Jenny, "when are you going to take Stevie in?"
"I said, Step won't do it."
"You're at home," said Jenny. "Now that he works human hours, he carpools, so you have the car. You also have the checkbook. Take Stevie in and what's Step going to know till you've done it?"
DeAnne was appalled. "Would you really do such a thing to Spike?"
"If Spike ever dared to put his foot down and forbid me to do something that I knew my child needed, hell yes!"
"Well Step didn't put his foot down," said DeAnne. "We just didn't agree, that's all."
"Well then what's the problem?" asked Jenny. "If he didn't forbid it, then you can just go and do it."
DeAnne was nonplussed. It was as though Jenny came from a different tribe with strange marriage customs. "Jenny" she said, "Step and I don't do things about the children until we agree."
"I can see it now," said Jenny. "The child bleeding to death on the lawn, and you on the phone talking it out with Step."
"It's not like that," said DeAnne. Then she closed her mouth and decided it would be better if she said nothing else.
After a minute, Jenny broke the silence. "Um, if you want to kill me, could you wait till we've got the kids out of the car?"
"What?" asked DeAnne.
"You're going about sixty and this is a thirty- five zone."
It was true. DeAnne immediately put on the brake and the kids lurched around in the back, making grumbling noises in their sleep. "Sorry," said DeAnne.
"Look, be mad at me if you want," said Jenny, "but it's Step you're mad at and you know it. Call it what you want, he's stopping you from doing what you know is right for your child. The mother bear in you is not happy DeAnne. Besides, one of those doctors is even in the ward. Well, she's not a member herself, but her son just joined."
DeAnne made a connection in her mind. "Step was just assigned to a home teaching companion like that. A
young man whose mother isn't a member but she drives him to church."
"That's the one," said Jenny. "She's a shrink. Dr. Greenwald told me she was probably the one most likely to have an opening, too."
"Why, because she's no good?"
"Because she's a woman," said Jenny. "Most men have a harder time going to a woman therapist, and a lot of women have an easier time going to a man. Or they think they will, anyway. Dr. Greenwald said. It's like gynecologists. I for one don't understand why any woman would go to a male ob- gyn ever, now that there are women doing the job, but they still dominate the business. Anyway, she's got a connection with the Church and she's sympathetic. She's more likely to understand."
"Understand what?"
Jenny laughed. "I can see you've never been to a shrink. They think religious people are crazy"
"Not true," said DeAnne, thinking at once of Sheila Redmond back in Vigor. "I knew a therapist and she and her husband were serious Christians. Not Mormon, but they certainly didn't think it was crazy to be religious."
"Have you ever taken the Minnesota Multiphasic?"
DeAnne vaguely remembered that she had taken it once, but couldn't recall anything more than that.
"It's got questions all over it like, Do you believe that God sometimes talks to you? I mean, that's our whole religion, isn't it? That God still talks to human beings. And by their rules it means we're crazy!"
For the first time DeAnne began to think that maybe Step was right. If psychiatrists were really like that, then it could be a disaster to take Stevie to see one. As Step said, they didn't really cure people that often. And if the psychiatrist actually did talk Stevie out of his belief in the gospel ...
"What I'm saying," said Jenny, "is that maybe you can talk Step into it if he knows the shrink and trusts her.
So just make sure he does his home teaching and meets Lee Weeks's mom."
Step came home with his trophies: a copy of his employment agreement, excluding Hacker Snack and any work he might do for computers not being supported by Eight Bits Inc., and the memo from Ray Keene stating that Eight Bits Inc. would not be supporting the IBM PC. He thought DeAnne would be overjoyed.
"I can quit now," he said.
"Not really" she said.
"The option in our contract with Agamemnon says that at any point in the first six months I can send them a letter saying I'll be working on PC programs for them, and that's it. We get a check. And when I turn in Hacker Snack for the 64 we get another check. And when I turn in Hacker Snack for the PC, we get another check. Which means that before Christmas, if I work hard enough and learn 8088 machine language quick enough, we'll have had a total income this year of more than fifty thousand dollars."
"That's fine when all that money comes," said DeAnne. "But what about right now? You may have noticed that we have a baby due in July. I don't think we're going to be able to get a new insur ance policy that will cover a preexisting pregnancy."
Step looked at her belly for a moment, as if the baby might come up with an idea.
"You can't quit till the baby is born," she said. "As it is, the first check from Agamemnon will barely catch us up on the house in Vigor." She held up a letter. "They're warning us that we have thirty days to bring the loan current before they'll begin foreclosing on the house."
"But don't you see?" said Step. "If I quit right now, we'll have enough money to pay for the house and the baby."
"Do you think I haven't gone over the figures?" said DeAnne. "Do you think I haven't read the Agamemnon contract? Do you think I haven't calculated all our payments down to the penny? If you quit now, and anything goes wrong with the pregnancy, we'll be in such deep trouble that we'll never get out. We need the insurance.
We've got to be covered."
She was right, but she was also wrong. "DeAnne, Ray's decision not to support the PC is a deep and serious mistake. Some where along the line-and I think it'll be soon-Ray will realize that and there'll be another memo.
We have a brief time right now when I can quit and go straight into PC projects. But if Eight Bits Inc. is supporting the PC when I quit, then I have to wait a year before I can do anything but Hacker Snack for Agamemnon, and we really can't live on just Hacker Snack for one year, even if it sells brilliantly."
DeAnne looked away from him; he could see that she was trying to control her emotions. "I don't know what to do, then," she said.
"I can't even afford to buy a PC until we exercise our option and get the check from Agamemnon," said Step.
"If we lose the house in Indiana," said DeAnne, "that'll be on our record forever. Every loan application there'll be a questionhave you ever been in default on a loan? Have you ever had a mortgage foreclosed?"
"We won't lose the house," said Step. "We'll lower the selling price, what about that? We won't even get our equity out. That's fifteen thousand down the toilet, but-"
"It's more than that," said DeAnne. "It's the money we spent on the new furnace and the air-conditioning and the rewiring and the Anderson windows and I wish we'd never moved! If we had stayed there and you had just gone to San Francisco on your own, you could have signed with Agamemnon and we'd still be in the house and—"
"DeAnne," said Step, "what good will it do for us to start second-guessing ourselves? We had no way of knowing Agamemnon would take me on-we wrote to them, didn't we? And how would I have gone to San Francisco? We were already broke."
"I know," she said. "But I feel us circling and circling around in a whirlpool, getting sucked down, and this job is something to hold on to."