Athena didn’t know where to look. Resembling nothing so much as a transistor radio, the scanner lay on the table in front of her. Idly, she adjusted a control, and faint grumbling sounds issued forth.
“So, what happened today?” Pam giggled, leaning forward and fairly quivering with anticipation. “Go on any calls?”
Athena glanced at her eager face, then got up and limped to the door. “Out, Dooley.” She held the door open. “Go on out.” The shaggy brute of a dog rolled its head in her direction and exhaled heavily. Athena advanced purposefully, raising one foot as though to kick, and with vast reluctance, the dog struggled, yawning, to its feet, shook itself, then shambled with infinite slowness out the door and across the dark porch. She slammed the door.
“So what happened? Was it bloody?”
Tight-lipped with annoyance, Athena briefly sketched the events of the day, while Pam visibly savored every word. Finally, she described the last call and the woman who’d been so difficult. Ordinarily, she found Pamela’s company barely tolerable, but to night the alternative seemed worse.
“Them damn pineys,” Pam interrupted. “They just don’t know when they’re well-off.” Pamela had once worked a civilian munitions job at Fort Dix, and in her own eyes this forever exempted her from piney status. Weak static crackled from the scanner. “Wasn’t there no other calls today?”
She almost snapped but caught herself. “Actually…I don’t know how much longer I can afford to work on the rig.”
“What? You’re kidding!”
“The money’s almost gone.” Athena shrugged. The money—the few thousands that Granny Lee had left her. Every penny of Wallace’s had gone into the house before he died. “I can’t even pay you much longer. Not that I’ve even been very good about that.”
“I keep telling you, you don’t have to pay me.”
She stirred her coffee again. “I used to be so sure of myself.” She laughed. “God, I’ve made such a mess of things.”
Puzzlement spread over Pam’s face. “So, what are you gonna do? Get on welfare?”
“Like every other piney?” Grimly—as though it were the most important thing in the world—Athena examined her chewed and broken fingernails. “I hear there’s going to be an opening at the state hospital.”
Pam gasped. “But Matty’s…!”
“A job opening,” she explained hastily as she turned her gaze to the horrible coffee and mused on a future of spoon feedings and bedpans.
“Harrisville? But you can’t even stand to be around one….” Pamela blinked and set her cup down. “That’d be a real shame,” she continued carefully. “I mean, if you had to quit the ambulance and all. I know how much you like it.”
Athena waved a fly away from the sugar.
“Uh, you know, ’Thena, about welfare,” she explained with an audible gush of sympathy. “You could probably get some. I mean, since you got Matty and all.”
The other woman glanced up and then averted her eyes again.
Pam searched her face. Panicked by the conjunction of subjects—the boy and the asylum—she cast her eyes about wildly. The Ouija board had been pushed to one side of the table, and she pounced on it with desperate enthusiasm. “You want to play? You should of seen all the fun me and Matty had to night. Chabwok just wouldn’t shut up for some reason. You should of seen all the stuff he was saying. ‘Danger’ and ‘death’ and stuff.” She slid the board between them. “You want to play?” Pointed stars and moons with faces decorated the chipped and peeling board. An empty water glass rested upside down over the letters. “Come on,” she coaxed. “We can ask it about the ambulance!”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on, I bet it says you’re gonna get money from some-wheres.”
“My grandmother had one of these.” She rested her hand lightly on the board. “She was so religious. Did I ever tell you? Something of an amateur spiritualist. All the neighbors and church folk always used to come in for advice.”
“Yeah? Like old Mother Jenks?”
“They used to try to give her money.” Athena’s voice stayed low and soft. “She’d never take it. ‘It’s a gift.’ That’s what she’d say. A gift.”
“You went to live with her after your mom died?”
“Did you hear something outside?”
“Prob’ly just the dog.”
“Shall we make the trip to mount Holly this week?” Changing the subject, Athena cleared her throat. “We must be out of nearly everything. I know we need sugar.”
“Yeah, all we really got is cans a soup. Remember, ’Thena, I bought all that stuff, and then I forgot and bought more?”
The red light on the scanner wavered, and Athena went absolutely still.
Pam could just make out what sounded like garbled numbers in the static. “What…?”
“Police dispatcher, out by Atsion.” She listened. “That’s an accident.”
“Will you have to go?”
She shushed her. “At this hour, usually they’ll call Burlington County.” For another moment, she strained to hear voices. “My mother’s not dead. She’s in a…a sort of a home.”
Outside was blackness, and the crickets raged. The two women sat in the grimy kitchen and listened to the scanner and planned a trip to a distant supermarket, the Ouija board untouched between them. “You hungry?” Pamela scrounged stale cookies out of a canister.
Small wonder they w ere running low, Athena reflected—her sister-in-law ate everything in sight. Setting down the pencil stub, she twisted dials on the scanner, trying to recapture fading words. Finally giving up with a sigh, she continued writing up a shopping list on a bit of brown paper.
“…an’ as long as we’re gonna be in Mount Holly, I’ll be needing some more bug spray, because them damn bees are eating up my flowers again. I swear, you can just sit there an see them going right after my flowers.”
Athena almost choked on her coffee.
“Oh, an’ I used your last light bulb. Didn’t you notice how nice an bright it is in here?” She waited for a response, but Athena had stopped paying attention again. “I guess it must be getting late.” Noisily draining the last of the liquid, Pam plunked her cup down on the tablecloth and stood up. “I guess I better be—”
“I’ll walk out with you. I want to get rid of this garbage before the ants find it.”
“Can’t that wait till morning, ’Thena? I know you don’t want to go out there.”
Ignoring her, Athena maneuvered around the crowded kitchen and scraped plates into a leaking bag.
“Here, why don’t you let me help you with that?” But she just leaned against the cellar door and watched.
“You want to get the back door, Pamela? Don’t forget your board.”
“I’m gonna leave it here. We’re supposed to play again tomorrow.” She held the door open while Athena carried the garbage onto the porch. “Oh, I meant to carry up that…” Pam hesitated. “You know that bag of clothes down the cellar? Matty needs…never mind, I’ll get them tomorrow.”
“I’ll do it,” said Athena. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust. The open doorway lit the porch floor; it seemed to silence the crickets. “No.” The light began to swing away. “Leave the door open.”
“But, ’Thena, the mosquitoes…”
“Leave it.” The night sounded like a rustling curtain. Holding the bag away from herself, she moved down the porch steps as a brown form emerged from the yard.
“Why don’t you just give that to me to dump?” Pamela trudged along behind her. “You go back to the house.”
Athena kept walking, her shadow, framed in the kitchen light, spreading across the yard, while the dog frisked around, sniffing at the garbage.
“Well then,” suggested Pam, “why don’t you just dump it here for now and…Oh well. Sure is dark to night. Get outta my way, Dooley.” Reluctantly, she took the path that led around to the front of the house. “Well then, see ya tomorrow then, I guess. You walkin’ me home, dog?”