The Amulet. A.R. Morlan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 lady, no one wanted to mow the lawn or shovel snow for her anymore after a couple of years, and after being insulted once too often, even the Meals on Wheels crew refused to drive out and serve her.

      Not that the old lady had ever been Miss Popularity or Miss Congeniality. Anna remembered the time when several of their neighbors came up to Mom as she hung out clothes in the backyard of the old lady’s house, and politely yet apprehen­sively explained that Ma shouldn’t think it was anything personal, but none of them would be talking or paying any attention to the old lady anymore—and the same went for Ma and little Anna.

      Apparently, the neighbors had elected Mrs. Armstrong from across the alley to be the main spokeswoman. She was the one who told Ma, “Please don’t think we mean you any ill will, Tina, but that mother of yours...well, we’ve put up with about as much as we’re going to take. The backbiting, the things she yells at us out the win­dow when you and little Anna are gone, the other things we think she’s doing—”

      “What do you mean, think she’s doing?” At five years old, Anna knew when her mother was ready to blow; that vertical fore­head furrow was already in place, even though Ma was only twenty-one years old.

      Mrs. Armstrong began wiping her chapped hands on her apron, smoothing it against her thighs with dry, scratchy sounds. “Now, Tina, we don’t know for certain that your mother is to blame, but...well, it’s just an awfully strange coincidence that every time one of us has a tiff of some sort with her, we find—”

      Mrs. Armstrong hung her head, cheeks red, so Mrs. Cooper finished for her, arms crossed over her flat freckled chest. “We think your mother is doing...dirt on our back lawn. And then scratching grass and dirt over it, like a dog or—”

      And that was when Ma threw them out of the yard. But people still don’t hold it against Ma. Didn’t she have that nice hearty, break-your-eardrums laugh whenever she met her neighbors in some public place? And didn’t Ma always smile at everyone she knew?

      And didn’t Ma take it out on me when we were alone? Anna found herself thinking, as she swirled the last, near­-melted nubs of ice around in her half-empty glass.

      “—been a shitty year all around, I say,” Mr. Winston was pontificating over at the round Colonial table near the door. He and his long-time, also sixty-some-year-old buddy Palmer Nemmitz (whose wife Bitsy made ugly fabric-vegetable refrigerator magnets to sell at the Methodist Market each spring, and she was СКАЧАТЬ