"My grandmother is."
Pee Wee shook his head. "If it's always been here, how come it didn't start killing until now? I don't buy this invincible stuff. That's crap." He nodded toward Sue, smiled at her. "I'm with Sue here. I think we can right it."
"I hope so," Rich said."
Robert nodded. "Me, too."
Robert and Pee Wee went into the paste up room with Rich, while Sue finished typing her article. Robert and Pee Wee left soon after, and she went into the back to help Rich and Fredricks put the paper to bed.
Robert returned alone a little after noon. Fredricks had gone home nearly an hour before, and she and Rich were alone in the back room. It was Rich's turn to pick up Anna from school, and Robert offered to accompany his brother on the trip. It was obvious to Sue that the police chief had something he wanted to say to Rich alone, so she declined Rich's invitation to join them. The editor promised before they left that he would bring back tacos and a Coke for her lunch, and she gratefully and hungrily accepted.
They'd been gone only a few minutes, and she was still looking through her desk drawer for a blue correcting pencil with which to go over the pages, when the front door to the office opened and she heard Carole's cheerful greeting. "Good afternoon, sir. May I help you?"
The visitor had the pained, gruff voice of an older man. "I need to talk to Rich."
"What does this concern?" the secretary asked.
"I have an item to put in the "Upcoming Events' column
"Then you need to speak to Miss Wing. She's out of the office right now."
"Who's Miss Wing?"
"The chink that Rich hired."
Sue felt her stomach drop and her chest tighten. She had to remind herself to breathe. The secretary's voice was just as saccharine sweet as always as she continued to talk to the man, but Sue heard only the tone, not the substance. The wordmthat word--was still echoing in her mind.
Chink. It was the fact that Carole knew her personally and still chose to refer to her in such a degradingly depersonalized way that hurt her the most. In that telltale moment, she had been granted a glimpse behind the facade, and she knew now that Carole's grandmotherly niceness was only a show, a front.
It felt to Sue as though the ground had been pulled out from underneath her. A moment ago, this newsroom had been her home, a place as known and comfortable to her as the restaurant, but now she felt like an intruder, her surroundings suddenly alien.
In high school, she'd never encountered any overt racism, but she'd heard the jokes out of the corner of her ear. "Her pussy's sideways, too," Bill Catfield had said once to his friends. She'd wanted to tell him that her eyes weren't "sideways," that her mouth wasn't
"sideways," and that even a pinhead could deduce from that that her vagina would not be "sideways" either, but she'd walked by and pretended not to hear, trying to ignore the snickers of Bill and his friends.
She'd done a lot of ignoring over the years. And she'd hought all that was done with.
But apparently not. She closed her drawer, walked over to Rich's desk and looked through it, and went back to paste up before realizing that if she was going to find a blue pencil, she would have to get one from Carole.
She didn't want to face the secretary, was afraid to face her. Her hands were shaking slightly, and for some absurd reason she felt guilty, as though she had done something wrong, but she forced herself to walk around the partition to the front office.
Carole smiled sweetly at her. "Oh, hello, honI didn't know you were here."
"I uh, was in the back," Sue lied. "Pasting up. I was wondering if you have a blue correction pencil I could use."
"Why sure." Carole opened her middle drawer, took out a pencil, and handed it to Sue, who took it with trembling fingers. "By the way, a man stopped by with an item for "Upcoming Events." " She handed Sue a pink "While You Were Out" note. "He said to give him a call."
Sue nodded. "Thanks." She walked quickly back be hind the modular wall into the newsroom. She vowed to herself that she would not be intimidated by the secretary's bigotry, that she would not allow the old woman's attitude to dictate her actions or affect her in any way.
But she was still shaking as she went into the back room and started to proof the front page.
Sue felt drained by the time she arrived at the restaurant. She wanted to go into the back and talk to her grand mother, but before she even reached the cash register her mother was walking toward her, motioning toward theta ble where John was busily writing on a mimeographed worksheet. "I want you to help your brother with his homework."
Sue did not even feel like arguing. She dropped her notebook on the table. "Fine," she said in English.
She pulled up a chair and sat down. John, seated opposite her, papers fanned out before him, textbooks piled near his elbow, looked up. "I don't need your help," he said.
"Mother wants me to help you. I don't want to." "Why do I have to do homework today anyway? It's Friday. Why can't I just do it Sunday and take today and tomorrow off?."
"Talk to them."
"They don't understand anything."
"Tough." Sue leaned forward to look at his worksheet.
"What do you need help with?"
"I told you. Nothing."
"Then why did Mother tell me to help you?"
"Because they're fighting and they don't want you to go back there.
We're not supposed to know."
Sue listened. Sure enough, she could hear the low, angry tones of a hushed argument coming from the kitchen. "What are they fighting about?" she asked.
"The menus." '
"What about the menus?
"Who knows? Who cares?"
Sue sighed, leaning back in her chair. She wished some times that she and John were closer. She wished she could talk to him, seriously talk to him. But they'd never had that sort of relationship; she'd never been the patient, understanding older sister, he'd never been the adoring younger brother, and it was too late for them to change now. Their roles were set, the confines of their relation ship clear
E Had he been acting differently lately? That was something she had not been able to determine. Her grand mother and parents had been closely watching him also, she knew, and although none of them had discussed it, all of them had been tiptoeing around him, treating him as they would someone with a fatal disease. Maybe he sensed it, maybe he could tell.
Maybe that's why he was so angry.
Influenced.
John pushed his paper across the table toward her, spinning it around.
"Okay," he said. "Number five. See if you can figure it out."
Sue looked down at the worksheet, read the question, a simple geometry problem, and turned the paper sideways between them so they could both look at it. She leaned forward over the table and explained to him how to figure it out.
He sat back in his chair, frowned at her. ""Ya tsa may," he said.
She hit his shoulder. "Shut up. Your breath's worse than mine."
"He won't want to kiss you." "Who?" "The editor."
She shook her head. "Don't be stupid." John grinned. "You like him, huh?" Sue reddened. "Knock it off." "I'm telling Father." "Telling him what?"
"That you like that old guy." "He's not that old." "See? I'm telling."
She pushed the paper across the table at him. "Fine.
Do your own homework. I hope you fail."
"I didn't want your help anyway."
She walked around the register, into the kitchen. Her parents were still arguing, but they shut up the second she came through the door.
She opened the refrigerator, grabbed a can of Coke, and continued through the kitchen into the back room, where her grandmother was plucking a chicken. "Hello, Grandmother," she said.