She watched them out of sight and then felt the baby inside her do his stretching thing, pushing against her ribs until it hurt, until she thought she couldn't stand it anymore. She wanted to swat the baby, to yell at it, to demand that it stop hurting her, that it just leave her alone for a minute.
The baby pushed all the harder. He was probably responding to the grief hormones flowing through her body, the chemical anguish.
At last the pressure subsided and she could think of walking again. "Come on, kids. This isn't the Cowpers'
house anymore, so we better go on home."
When she got home, there was the Cowpers' old beat-up Datsun B-210. The car that made her and Step a two-car family for the first time in their marriage. She walked up and touched it, examined it, the paint pitted and faded, the doors rusted through at running-board height. She caressed the car as if it were a horse that no one had been able to tame but her. Thank you for Jenny, she said. But why did you have to take her away from me so soon?
She stopped herself from thinking that way, and said, very clearly and definitely inside her mind, Thank you for Jenny. And then she forced herself to leave it at that, to go inside and concentrate on fixing lunch, which was long overdue.
There was a substitute mailman, so the mail didn't arrive till almost four o'clock. There was an envelope from Agamemnon, and inside was the check. The money that would catch them up on their payments on the house in Indiana. If the regular mailman hadn't been on vacation, she could have paid the Cowpers for the car before they left.
Oh, well. She'd make out the checks tomorrow and everything would be fine. Most of the money would be gone immediately, they were so far behind-and none of it could go to the IRS for their back taxes, so that still hung over their heads. Still, freedom was in sight.
But the next day when she sat down to write out the checks, she just couldn't bring herself to do it. It made her feel so stupid, to find it emotionally impossible to write the checks. Hadn't she and Step decided last night that they would definitely go ahead and pay the mortgage up to date?
Finally she wrote out a check for the amount of the oldest overdue mortgage payment, along with all the late fees that had accrued on that one payment. She put it in an envelope, piled the kids into the car, drove to the post office, and slipped the envelope into the box.
A month. That's all I'm doing, just paying for one month's delay before they foreclose. Why? It's stupid and dangerous they'll probably still call the note; this one payment won't do anything at all. But I can't wipe out that five thousand dollars sitting in the bank. I can't bring it down to nothing because who knows when the next check will come?
10: Independence Day
This is what the Fletchers did on the Fourth of July: The 1st Ward had a flag-raising ceremony at dawn, along with a pancake breakfast. Step could think of about three thousand things he'd rather do than get up before dawn on the Monday morning of the only three-day weekend of the summer, but the elders quorum was cooking the pancakes and DeAnne was conducting the choir's singing of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Having a southern church choir sing that song was in itself remarkable enough to be worth getting up early just to hear it.
In the weeks since the Cowpers had moved, the choir leader, Mary Anne Lowe, had been cultivating DeAnne's friendship. To Step it seemed almost as if Sister Lowe had been waiting for Jenny to get out of the picture before she moved in, as if there were room for only one friend in DeAnne's life at a time. And maybe it was so. DeAnne didn't exactly have a surplus of time and energy. Still, it seemed to Step that this friendship was different from the friendship with Jenny. Where Jenny had seemed to revive DeAnne, to buoy her up, Mary Anne's ebullient energy only made DeAnne seem more tired. Most annoying to Step was the way that being friends with Mary Anne Lowe meant having more and more duties in the ward music program. Like conducting the choir for the sunrise flag raising and all those practices on Satur days and Sundays getting ready for it.
When DeAnne had done compassionate service with Jenny, it almost always happened during the day, but the choir practices took place during the few hours that Step had home with DeAnne, with the family, and so he ended up either going to choir practice himself, as the only tenor, or staying home trying to tend the children while typing Hacker Snack code into the Commodore 64.
Even with Jenny gone, the compassionate service assignments continued. Sister Bigelow was still on the phone with DeAnne a couple of times a week, so that Step would come home from work and find DeAnne ready to rush over to Sister Something-or-other's house with a salad or a casserole or a plate of biscuits and a tub of gravy and could Step please just watch the kids for an hour and maybe slice up the cucumbers for the salad?
Sure, DeAnne. And I'll finish Hacker Snack in December, about three months after we're bankrupt.
Then he'd feel bad about being so childishly resentful and he'd go ahead and do the things she had asked and, usually, more, so she'd get back and find dinner ready to eat, or the kids already bathed, or whatever else he figured he could accomplish to make her feel cared for and help her get some rest because, after all, wasn't she the one carrying their child? What right did he have to think that she somehow wasn't doing enough?
After the sunrise service and the pancakes, which tasted like they were cut from cardboard and went down like lead, the Fletchers came home and the kids began to fuss and fight with each other. Step solved the problem by sending them all back to bed, since they were obviously too tired to get along in human society; and then he took DeAnne by the arm and dragged her back to bed. Within fifteen minutes Robbie and Betsy were both asleep and so was DeAnne. Stevie, of course, stubbornly lay there in bed with his eyes open until Step walked in and quietly told him he could read if he wanted to. Finally Step went to bed and lay there feeling physically worn out and very sleepy. He continued to feel that way for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, until he gave up and went into the family room and slipped the Hacker Snack disk into the drive and turned on the computer.
It made the usual horrible grinding sound as it activated the disk drive-though it was not as bad as the metallic chewing noise the Commodore disk drive made-and then the familiar screen came up and Step began to move his little cartoon character, Rodney, with his nerdy glasses and perpetual melvin, through the maze of computer chips and hamburgers.
This is boring, thought Step. Not the first time, but each level is really just more of the same. You don't get that much pleasure out of the tenth time you play it.
The normal solution to this problem was to make each suc ceeding level so hard that you kept playing just to try to beat the machine and get your name on the vanity board. But for Step that wasn't enough. It had to be fun the first time, and yet the game had to be rich enough that at higher and higher levels better stuff happened, so that the game became its own reward.
What could he change without eating up too much memory? Well, it didn't have to be computer chips and burgers. He could work in other stuff-maybe different computer brands! Eating a VIC-20 and a Timex and an Apple II on the way to finally reaching an Atari and then maybe a mainframe or something.
If I'm going to do an evolutionary sequence like that, why not do evolution itself? Instead of starting with Rodney, I start with a salamander or something that climbs up out of primordial ooze and then at each level he becomes something else. A dinosaur. A mammal. A shrew, maybe. And then a chimp. And then Homo habilis, and then some big athletic- looking guy, and then finally, as the crowning pinnacle of evolutio n, the computer hacker, the nerd with glasses and a melvin! OK, that would be fun, but it would chew up disk space, especially since he couldn't very well have dinosaurs collecting computer chips, so he'd have to change the thing they ate at every level. Leaves for the dinosaurs-and maybe salamanders, the guys from the previous level! And the shrews could eat dinosaur eggs. And the athletic guys could trample Homo habilis guys and leave them in a cartoony pile of arms and legs like Beetle Bailey after the sergeant gets through beating him up. And then Rodney could leave athletic guys behind him holding pink slips!