A.R. Morlan

The Amulet


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problem with the FmHA check, they’ve accepted them with my signature when she’s been too angry with me to sign them, and they’ll take cash for the rest of the bills, and I suppose I can take on more jobs through the service—), even as the little girl in her raged, Why in hell did you pick up and leave? Do you really think it’ll be any better somewhere else? You’ll always be you, with the same emotional baggage as before...and you’ll see—the old lady will find out where you are, and call you with some imagined complaint.

      “Oh, fuck,” Anna said as she stared at the roomful of castoffs, found wall schlock, and cat-chewed houseplants that didn’t reflect either her own or her mother’s tastes—a sort of hell’s waiting room she’d been forced to spend her time in for lack of any other place to go. “Now I have to take care of the old lady.”

      She wondered if the old lady had tried to call her when she was out at the bar. The old lady only used her phone to make outgoing calls. If Anna or Ma wanted to call her, they had to use a complicated code of one ring, disconnect, then two rings, then one after another disconnect, and then wait for the old lady to call them. All because the old lady claimed that people were calling her and not saying anything when she answered the phone. And considering the delegation of less-than­-neighborly neighbors who had spoken to Ma over twenty years ago, there was a good possibility that the old lady’s claims were true—even if she wouldn’t let the phone company install a tracer on the line.

      Guilt nibbled on the sense of grief Anna was just beginning to feel over Ma’s leaving her. Letting a stream of air out past her upcurled bottom lip, until her bangs flew away from her eyes in a puff of light brown, she dialed the old lady’s number and began the signaling sequence. Afterward, she sat on the edge of the old trunk next to the phone stand and adjusted the shade of the black metal and gold glass lamp that sat on the black trunk, along with a nearly denuded avocado plant and one of the cat baskets.

      It was no use waiting, hand on the receiver, since the old lady always took her sweet time calling back. Claimed she couldn’t get up too fast out of her rocker, that she became dizzy, or worse, or so Ma said. Anna had tried to argue that the old lady was only in her sixties (sixty-three in late December, as a matter of fact), and nowadays, that wasn’t old in the least.

      (“For Chrissakes, Ma, Fred Astaire was still hoofing in his late sixties, and he looked pretty damn good before he died in his eighties—”

      (“The old lady don’t like him.”

      (“So?”

      (“So she don’t care how fit Fred Astaire was when he died. He had things a lot easier than she did—”

      (“Oh come off it. You know she was well-taken care of after...after you know. Her aunts took good care of her—”

      (“How the hell do you know?”

      (“All right, did they make her work? Sell papers, matches? It was the Depression, and she had a house to live in and food to eat. And clothes on her back, I’ve seen those dresses of hers—”

      (“The ones you ruined on her?”

      (“‘Ruined,’ my ass. It was her fault she made me try them on when she knew I was fatter than she was as a kid—”

      (“That’s right, you were a goddamn fat moose of a—”) The ringing phone snapped Anna out of her bad memories; reaching over, she picked up the beige receiver and said, “Hello?”

      “You rang?” Ma had been right about one thing. For a woman of only sixty-two, the old lady did sound like an octogenarian, or older. What Anna especially hated was that quavery, phlegm-sliding-down-stucco quality in the old woman’s voice, and that false, coquettish lilt on the word rang. Leaning against the lamp shade, until the room’s shadows were all off-kilter, Anna said, “Ma’s gone. I heard she’s down in Eau Claire. She took the bus. Has she tried to call you?”

      “So Mother took off. Are you all right there? You can sleep in my house,” she said in that quivering singsong that Anna had hated for years, ever since the old lady’s voice went bad back in the late seventies.

      “No...no. I have the cats to look after. Unless you want me to bring—”

      “Oh, no. Ma told me about that big kitty of yours—”

      “We have two big cats.” Anna felt herself getting ready to snap. She wished Mouth would wake up and start caterwauling—anything to drown out the old lady’s gravel-in­-grease gurgle.

      “I know that,” the old lady said with an explosive hiss. I’m talking about that big kitty—the mean one.”

      “Brupie? He’s a sweetie. Big softie of a—”

      “That’s not what Ma says,” the old woman warbled, like a knowing child kicking up sand as she pumped herself higher, higher on a playground swing. For a second, Anna pitied the two maiden aunts who had come up from downstate to look after her grandmother in 1931, after great-grandpa had gone berserk.

      “Your Ma says that Bruiser is a vicious animal.”

      “Because he nipped at her when she touched his frostbit ­toes. You’d nip too if you were in his paws.”

      Wheezing laughter drifted out of the receiver’s tiny holes. Stunned, Anna thought, Hey, old bat, your daughter’s just off, and you’re laughing? as the old lady went on, “How would I fit them on?” followed by more of that hissing mirth.

      Rum and cola bile hung at the back of Anna’s throat as she snapped. “How would you fit into what?” Her grandmother could be worse than a six-year-old who had just discovered knock-knock jokes.

      “His paws! I have bigger feet, you know,” she added, as if Anna were too dense to understand her.

      Anna’s head hurt. For a second, she felt pure empathy for her mother; sometimes Ma stayed with the old lady for hours on end. It was almost enough to let Anna forgive Ma for all the names she’d called her over the years.

      Almost.

      “—see the news on Channel Eighteen?”

      “What?”

      “The news about that Inez bitch—the one who fired—”

      “Oh, that. Yeah. I saw it.”

      “On Channel Eighteen?”

      “No. Thirteen. In the bar—the Rusty Hinge,” she added defiantly.

      “Oh. Looking for a fella in there? Your Ma, she used to—”

      “No, I went because of my jack—Listen, it’s getting late. I need to get up early, okay? I’ll talk to you later.”

      “No, you’ll see me later.”

      Ye gods, she’s right. Tuesday is the day Mom picks up her bills and stuff. Oh, shit. And I didn’t want to see her again until she was on a stand in the Reish-Byrne Funeral Home. Damn.

      “Yeah, well, okay. I’ll be around sometime tomorrow. ’Bye.”

      “Bye-bye,” the old lady hissed triumphantly as Anna let the receiver drop to the cradle with a brittle clack.

      Leaning against the lamp until the shade began to buckle, Anna looked around her, and thought, Those jerks in New York don’t even know the meaning of Black Monday, and began to cry open-faced, her hands resting palm up on her thighs—in almost exactly the same position Inez Hibbing had been found that morning.

      SEVEN—Inez

      Across town, the body of the former Inez Hibbing, until recently wife of Norm Hibbing (who really should have known better than to marry the town mattress), of the Wisconsin Street novelty and used clothing store, was zipped naked into a black body bag lying on the floor of the Reish-Byrne Funeral Home. Such casual placement of her body was not accidental—not after Craig Reish had caught her back in 1978, in the process of trying to get his retarded Uncle Cooper tanked up, prior to attempting to roll the hapless man for the loose change he happened