of ’86 was just too much for him, pride or not.
“The cold killed old man Holiday, didn’t it? So, it was enough to make him come to you. The cold, not love,” as Ma liked to insist, to try and spoil the total, utter affection between Anna and the huge black cat with the thick neck and ropes of muscles across his shoulders. True, Anna still loved her other cat, but somehow, with Bruiser, it was different. And it didn’t bother Anna to admit that she loved the cat more than her own family. Bruiser never yelled at her or made her feel as if she was somehow less than human.
“Oh, no, no water. Oh, Brupie, Mama’s sorry,” Anna crooned, after glancing at the empty blue water dish on the floor. Bruiser rubbed his big head against her palm, snorting softly, as if to say, “I forgive you.”
Anna gently nudged the cat back into the room as she backed out, thinking that she had to face Ma sooner or later, so it might as well be now. But Ma wasn’t in the bathroom, even though the door was shut (If I pulled that kind of a stunt, she’d be all over me—), and she wasn’t in the kitchen, either. The basement light wasn’t on, but that didn’t mean anything—Ma had superb night vision, and sometimes went into the basement without turning on the lights, just to show Anna how wasteful she was when she turned her light on to clean the cat pan down there.
After giving Bruiser his water, Anna swallowed her pride and knocked on her mother’s bedroom door. No answer. She cracked open the door and peered in. The bed was unmade, and Ma’s clothes were strewn around the room, some in piles on the floor, others draped over chairs. Nothing terribly unusual there. But no Ma, either.
“Office at the FmHA must have been dirty,” she muttered as she went back into the kitchen, finally noticing that her mother’s coat wasn’t hung in its usual place—on a hanger outside the big double closet in the dining room. If Anna were to leave her coat out like that, it would mean another round of swearing and shouting.
Telling herself that nobody had promised her life would be fair, Anna peered in the refrigerator, trying to make out the back in the darkness (the light had gone out months ago—some sort of short in the wiring), gave up, and turned on the kitchen light.
“There you are, my pretties.” Anna grabbed the package of freezer-burn-discolored hot dogs she’d found at the IGA last week and went to set them on the counter, before getting a pot from under the stove...until what she saw on the cabinet door made her stand there, arms limp at her sides, the hot dogs fallen to the floor.
It was as if the very wood of the cupboards was bleeding. Viscid fluid bubbled up from between the coarse pale grain in huge, misshapen, oozing letters:
I’M FUCKING GONE!!!
Drops of smeary crimson had settled to the counter below, like splatters of arterial flow. Anna looked at them for a few seconds, unable to digest the reality of the dripping words, until she saw the nearly empty squeeze bottle of catsup resting on its side on the floor, where Ma must have dropped it—where Anna hoped that, indeed, her mother had dropped it.
SIX—Black Monday
“—fell 508 points, or twenty-two percent, to close at 1,738.74, the biggest one-day drop since—”
“Arnie, can’t you find anything else on the frigging dial? I’m sick and tired of all this Dow-Jones crapola. Won’t mean a hill of beans to anyone around here.” Palmer Winston, Anna’s former English teacher from EHS, banged his squaw-decorated white and red can of Leinenkugel’s on the worn Formica table until Arnie the bartender switched channels on small portable wall-mounted TV.
“—the offshore platforms were suspected to be bases for Iranian gunboats—”
“Oh, screw it, Arnie, put on that Empty-Tee-Vee shit. They don’t carry any bad news.” Old man Winston stubbed out his Lucky Strike in his round black ashtray, then leaned over in his maple captain’s chair until he could see Anna, where she was sitting in one of the Rusty Hinge’s dim back booths.
“Anna Sudek? Is that my best pupil hiding back there?”
Anna slurped her rum and Coke, then rocked the slightly greasy glass back and forth in her hand, until the ice cubes battered each other under the sloshing brown liquid. God, I must be blessed, she thought, before giving the retired teacher a little wave and nod. She was glad that the small, wood-paneled bar wasn’t busy tonight, although, for all she knew, perhaps five customers was busy for this place on a Monday night. With ten bars to choose from in Ewerton and the surrounding smaller towns, people weren’t exactly limited when it came to watering holes.
But the Rusty Hinge was long regarded in Ewerton and the surrounding towns of Lumbe and Hunterstown as an old fart’s bar, the kind of place where the “decor” consisted of scenic jigsaw puzzles assembled and glued onto sheets of warped cardboard and thumb-tacked onto the smoke-grimed walls; glossy stand-up display cards hung with naked-women car air fresheners, brightly enameled nail clippers, and greasy bags of fried pork rinds. The blackened smoke-eater hung above the bar was permanently on the fritz, and the surface of the tiny pizza oven behind the bar always bore burned-on free-form squiggles of cheese. It was the sort of seedy yet comfortable watering hole where old buddies and tolerated enemies could sit and gas the afternoon and evening away, with no disapproving glares from Ewerton’s pseudo-Yuppie upper middle class to distract from their pleasure.
And Anna was especially grateful that no other patron here today was younger than forty-five. Among her former classmates, she was a freak. Among the beer-guzzling, snack-munching oldsters, she was just pitiable, a spinster to be coddled and treated with benign condescension.
Anna had long ago learned that pity was more tolerable than horrified disdain.
When Mr. Winston realized that Anna wasn’t about to leave the confines of the orange-seated booth to sit with him, he nodded in reply and fished another Lucky Strike out of his battered pack, all the while keeping one almond-shaped blue eye on her. Anna leaned over her drink, letting her hair fall partly over her face, thinking, The old fuck must know about it, whole frigging town must be discussing it over dessert. Wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t know where the hell she is now, either.
After Anna had read the dripping red message on the cabinet (Ma’s words had slopped across the whole north set of doors where the dishes were kept), she had gone back to her mother’s room and had discovered that one of the suitcases she’d received for a college graduation present was missing (as if to bring the point home to Anna, Ma had taken the smallest case in the set), along with a couple of Ma’s blouses and pairs of pants, some underwear, a pair of shoes, and Ma’s bank book. That was it.
Anna had felt a momentary twinge of mingled guilt and relief that afternoon. Ma was gone, but at least they had had separate bank accounts, thanks to the advice of a woman Anna had met in college, whose husband died a few years ago. The woman had been broke for a month, until her joint accounts with her husband cleared through probate. Now, because of that woman’s advice, Anna had enough money to live on for a few weeks, not counting what she would earn cleaning. And while Anna never was sure exactly when Ma had left, a phone call she received a half hour after she came home gave her an inkling—Ma had never shown up at the FmHA building near the four-way stop that morning. Considering that Anna had left home around five, and Ma was expected at work around six-thirty, Ma must either have not bothered with work, or left before then. Either way, gone was gone. Anna placed a call to the woman who ran the cleaning service, telling her that Ma wouldn’t be coming in for a while, and that she should find someone else to handle Ma’s jobs.
Hanging up the phone, Anna knew that she should have taken on Ma’s jobs and just kept on sending in Ma’s time card, but she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t mind garbage picking—at least, not the way Ma did once the old lady started filling her head with doubt and shame.
Hope you’re happy, old bat. Ma didn’t want to live with you any more, so now you fixed it so she wasn’t satisfied living with me, either. There was no doubt in Anna’s mind as to what old lady had done. Once Anna and Ma moved out, the old lady was truly alone. From what Ma had told Anna after she’d started going to visit the old