The Last House on Needless Street(46)

One morning the Chihuahua lady came to the house before I left for school. I was eating cereal at the kitchen counter. Mommy was wearing her blue gauzy dress that floated behind her when she moved. The Chihuahua lady settled herself on a stool and poured three sachets of sweetener into her coffee. Steam wreathed about her head. She liked her coffee molten hot and sweet enough to kill. She took her dog out of her bag and put him on the counter. He had a little smooth, dark face, intelligent. He sniffed delicately at the coffee cups and blinked in the blue haze of cigarette smoke.

‘How can you do it?’ Mommy asked. ‘How can you keep that poor creature in captivity? Can’t you see the suffering in his eyes? It’s monstrous to breed and keep wild animals.’

‘You’re soft-hearted,’ the Chihuahua lady said. (Of course, I realise now, this was pre-Chihuahua. She was the dachshund lady, then, so I’ll call her that.)

The dachshund lady gave her a look and Mommy said, ‘Let’s go in the other room. Teddy, finish that math homework.’

They went to the living room and she shut the kitchen door. I heard her say, ‘Oh, that dog. I can’t bear to look at him. And don’t let him sit on my upholstered dining chairs! It’s not hygienic.’

I got out my math homework. I had a headache. It had been sitting there for a few days now, like a toad at the front of my skull. I stared at the page, which throbbed and swam. It was hard to concentrate with my brain pulsing like this. I seemed to have at least attempted some of the math problems last night, although I could also see that I had got most of them wrong. I sighed and took out my eraser. The dachshund lady’s voice drifted in and out. The kitchen door was thin pine board.

‘Something stinks,’ she said. ‘All week there have been these big meetings, and yesterday the cops came. They’re interviewing us all, one by one in the nurses’ lounge. It’s not very convenient. It means we have to go to the cafeteria for coffee. That’s three whole floors down in the elevator, and three floors back up again. It uses up all my break.’

‘Goodness,’ Mommy said. ‘What in heavens is that all about?’

‘I don’t know. They didn’t get to me yet; they’re going alphabetically. The girls won’t say. They all looked kind of upset when they came out.’

‘You know,’ Mommy said, ‘it doesn’t surprise me.’

‘No?’ I can almost hear the dachshund lady lean forward, anticipating.

‘Think about it. All that business with money. Where’s the money going, I’d like to know? We’re running the same ward we always have, on the same budget. Why is there suddenly so little to go around?’

‘Wow,’ says the dachshund lady on an indrawn breath. ‘Do you think there’s some kind of … scam or something going on at the hospital?’

‘It is not for me to say,’ Mommy said in her gentlest voice. ‘But I wonder, that is all.’

I heard the dachshund lady make a clicking sound with her tongue. ‘It never made sense to me, that they fired you,’ she said. ‘If I said it once I said it a million times. Now, that would explain things.’

Mommy didn’t answer and I imagined her shaking her head with her gentle, quizzical smile.

I started to feel upset, I didn’t know why. So I got into the old chest freezer. I pulled the lid down on top of me and I felt better straight away.

I lost some time after that. When I came back I was still in the freezer, or there again more probably. I heard the dachshund lady’s voice, and the scent of cigarette smoke trickled under the kitchen door from the living room. The kitchen was a little different. The tulips that had been on the windowsill were gone. The walls looked dirtier.

‘It’s a scandal.’ Mommy’s voice. ‘Throwing stones! They have broken every streetlight on this road. I blame the parents. Kids need discipline.’

I pushed open the kitchen door. The two women looked up at me in surprise. Mommy was wearing a green blouse and slacks. Through the window the day was cold, framed by bare twigs. The shaggy terrier sitting by the dachshund lady wasn’t a dachshund. It raised its brown-and-white head, blinking in the cigarette smoke. She was the terrier lady, now.

‘Go on, Teddy,’ Mommy said, gentle. ‘There is nothing to worry about. Finish the job application.’ I closed the door and went back to the kitchen where the application for the auto shop in town sat half finished on the counter.

It wasn’t the same day and I didn’t go to school any more. I had been kicked out for punching the boy by the lockers. Mommy thought it was better I stay home anyway. I was a help to her. I had never before lost so much time at once. I tried to collect the brief flashes of memory that gleamed in my mind. I was twenty or twenty-one, I thought, Mommy worked at the daycare, now, not the hospital. But actually she didn’t any more, because she had just been fired again, because people were mean.

I felt the difference in my body. I was bigger. Like, a lot bigger. My arms and legs were heavy. There was reddish hair on my face. And there were more scars. I could feel them on my back, itching under my T-shirt.

‘Meheeeeeco,’ the terrier lady is saying through the door. ‘I’m going to have a cocktail with breakfast every day. One with an umbrella.’ She has been looking forward to her vacation for weeks. ‘That nice Henry is coming with me. The one who packs the bags at the Stop and Go. Twenty-five years old, what do you think about that?’