The Amulet. A.R. Morlan

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t know what to say. She never did know what to say when Ma started on an “I’m tired” tirade. It wasn’t as if Ma was the only one suffering in the house; at least she’d been married once, and had had a kid, which was enough to make her less of an object of ridicule. Anna was twenty-nine and had never so much as dated, or even been able to pay a guy to take her someplace. Not that there was any guy poor enough in town to need to accept date money from someone like Anna Sudek, descendant of the embarrassment of Ewerton. And after years of going without male companionship, Anna no longer wanted it or needed it—it was simply easier to give up the search without ever having really begun it in the first place. Even if it meant not being able to sweet-talk any of her former classmates into hiring her now.

      Ma above all should have realized just how damned hard it would be for Anna to get anything more than menial jobs, despite her degree. No jobs would be forthcoming to Anna Sudek, any more than they were forthcoming for her mother, Tina Miner Sudek.

      It was as if what had happened fifty-some years ago had oc­curred yesterday. People who had actually been there were mostly gone, but the memory lingered on, thanks to the oft-told tales. And with the memory came the smoldering rage that someone had dared to give Ewerton a bad name, had dared to do something embarrass­ing—and that the Miner-Sudek clan still had the audacity to remain in town.

      Not that Anna and her mother actually wanted to remain in Ewerton. While free to go in one sense, they were chained in other, less obvious ways. Lack of money, for starters. Ma had managed to break free of town when she was a teenager­—had made it all the way to neighboring Wright County, in fact—but her divorce had sent her scuttling back home, Anna in tow, to the bitter sanctity of the old lady’s house, to be her unpaid slave. And when things got to be too much there, she and Anna had pooled the money Anna had earned doing work study in college (said education paid for by Uncle Sam, thanks to Anna’s unacknowledged-at-EHS intelligence, and ability to supplement her grant with scholarships) with the little money she had, and moved halfway across town, to this ticky-tacky house on Wilkerson Avenue, close to the smelly paper mill.

      When Ma and Anna had gone looking for work, no one had wanted to hire them, even though they weren’t the ultimate untouch­ables—out-of-towners. In Ma’s case they claimed she was under-qualified; in Anna’s that she was overqualified. Job Service wouldn’t touch them. Employers round-filed their applications. Scavenging took them through the first lean year—that and finding money on the streets, in the runner rims of the washing machines in the Super Suds Launderette, and in the many phone booths around town. They blew what money they held in reserve on bills, until the home cleaning service out in the hoity-toity Willow Hill section of town decided that they’d take a chance on the Sudeks, and offered them office cleaning jobs. (The service also handled in-home care for the elderly, but they were the ones who definitely remembered the Miner case.)

      During the past six years, Ma had cleaned the FmHA and paper mill offices, while Anna cleaned the Super Suds and two insurance offices. They pulled down enough to keep them selves and their two cats from being kicked out of the county, and the adjusted mortgage on the house helped, too. Surprisingly, though, she and Ma had be­come friends, getting along better—for a few years, at least—than they had during all the years spent under the old lady’s thumb. But it wasn’t meant to last, this fragile sense of well-being in the Sudek household.

      For Anna kept on getting older, and less marriageable by the year, just as their bills grew steadily thanks to inflation and rising costs, and eventually Ma fell victim to rages of angry words and tiny, self-inflicted wounds after the old lady had called their house two years ago, claiming to have fallen and hurt her hip.

      “Claimed” was how Anna chose to think about it; it was funny how the old lady supposedly perked up after Ma resumed relations with her. Of course, Anna didn’t know for sure that the old lady had improved; after the fights that precipitated the exodus from the Miner house on Evans Street seven years back, Anna had refused to go see the old lady. Why, for four years she had refused to even speak on the phone with the old woman, when she had called her on little Anna’s birthdays.

      But Ma had gone back, almost eagerly, thanks to the little gifts of money from the old lady, the latter’s little trick to make Ma obli­gated to do even more for her, to keep giving more and more of her­self to the old lady. And Ma spent most of every day with the old woman, doing the very odd jobs that had helped spark the original fight seven years ago, listening to the old lady’s tales of what her father had done so long ago.

      And the more time Ma spent with the old lady, commis­erating, griping about how this or that person had crossed her or Anna, the more Tina Sudek grew dissatisfied with the marginal existence she and Anna had carved out for them­selves. Suddenly, Dumpster diving was no longer an honor­able, if slightly messy way of steering clear of welfare. And suddenly, every little thing the cats did was wrong, filthy, evil—just as the old lady used to say about things that dis­pleased her.

      But Ma had been duty-bound to go back to the old lady, to help her out, just as Anna had considered herself duty-bound to stay at home with Ma, and give over her money to her. That sense of duty, of obligation, had been drummed into Anna’s head by the old lady since she was small—that, plus other things.

      “Good girls stay at home. Only bad little girls go out and play.”

      “If I could have, I would have taken care of my Ma all the time, even when she was old.”

      “Boys are bad. When they put that thing in you, it makes an ugly sound, like ham fat jiggling.”

      “I knew you were no good from the time you were born—lying there, kicking off your blankets, showing off your plum.”

      “Mark my words, Tina, she’s no good—gonna be knocked up by the time she’s sixteen, and kicked out of school.”

      “You’ll both starve without me. You’ll be back in a week.”

      No, they hadn’t come back in a week, and they hadn’t starved, but the old lady had Ma back, and had gone to work on her, until now all Ma did was sit scrunch-faced, mouth and eyes bitter under her light fringe of bangs, flailing at Anna with words and fists, jab­bing elbows and kicking feet.

      Anna watched her mother sit and cry, without covering her mouth or eyes with her hands. In a high, quivering squeak, she bawled, “I am so tired of this all, you hear me? Just so tired. And it’s all your fault—everything. This is all because you can’t stand her.”

      Unable to watch her mother, Anna glanced down at her watch. It was almost five, and the launderette’s automatic doors opened at five-thirty. Leaving the bags where she’d dropped them, Anna qui­etly got up and went into the kitchen, grabbing an old sweet roll be­fore she hurried to her bedroom, peeked in to see that the cats were all right (Bruiser was cornering Mouth, but they were both big cats, able to stand each other off for hours), then rushed out of the house.

      She supposed that she should have gone over to her mother and done something, said something comforting, but that time was long past between them. She was sorry for her mother, even as she wasn’t sorry at all.

      Anna could never forgive her mother for the way she had turned her back on the warmth and friendship they had finally shared, all because of one of the old lady’s all-too-transparent “I need help” ruses. Lucy Miner had been using the same sympathy-seeking tactics on Anna and Tina for years. It just didn’t cut it with Anna anymore.

      FOUR—Arlene (1)

      Arlene Campbell sat on her sofa, old rotary-dial phone perched on her lap, the cats playing with the Velcro flaps on her shoes, for even she wasn’t sure how long, before she finally dialed the police. Even then, she hung СКАЧАТЬ