Lisey's Story(33)

"Ow! Ow!" Manda cried, snatching her hand away. "That hurts, Lisey! Watch where you're pointin that thing, willya, okay?"

Lisey rejoined in exactly the same tone - Amanda would have expected no less, even with both of them buckass naked - but rejoiced at the sound of her sister's anger. It was awake.

"Well pardon me all the way to Kittery, but I wasn't the one who took a piece of the damn Pottery Barn to my hand."

"Well, I couldn't get at him, could I?" Amanda asked, and then unleashed a flood of stunning invective aimed at Charlie Corriveau and his new wife - a mixture of adult obscenity and childish poopie-talk that filled Lisey with amazement, amusement, and admiration.

When she paused for breath, Lisey said: "Shitmouth motherf*cker, huh? Wow."

Amanda, sullen: "Fuck you too, Lisey."

"If you want to come back home, I wouldn't use a lot of those words on the doc who treats your hands."

"You think I'm stupid, don't you?"

"No. I don't. It's just...saying you were mad at him will be enough."

"My hands are bleeding again."

"A lot?"

"Just a little bit. I think you better put some Vaseline on em."

"Really? Won't it hurt?"

"Love hurts," Amanda said solemnly...and then gave a little snort of laughter that lightened Lisey's heart.

By the time she and Darla bundled her into Lisey's BMW and got on the road to Norway, Manda was asking about Lisey's progress in the study, almost as if this were the end of a normal day. Lisey didn't mention "Zack McCool"'s call, but she told them about "Ike Comes Home" and quoted the single line of copy: "Ike came home with a boom, and everything was fine. BOOL! THE END!" She wanted to use that word, that bool, in Mandy's presence. Wanted to see how she'd respond.

Darla responded first. "You married a very strange man, Lisa," she said.

"Tell me something I don't know, darlin." Lisey glanced in the rearview mirror to see Amanda sitting alone in the back seat.

In solitary splendor, Good Ma would have said. "What do you think, Manda?"

Amanda shrugged, and at first Lisey thought that was going to be her only response. Then came the flood.

"It was just him, that's all. I hooked a ride with him up the city once - he needed to go to the office-supply store and I needed new shoes, you know, good walking shoes I could wear in the woods for hiking, stuff like that. And we happened to drive by Auburn Novelty. He'd never seen it before and nothing would do but he had to park and go right in. He was like a ten-year-old! I needed Eddie Bauer shitkickers so I could walk in the woods without getting poison ivy all over me and all he wanted to do was buy out that whole freakin store. Itchypowder, joy buzzers, pepper gum, plastic puke, X-ray glasses, you name it, he had it piled up on the counter next to these lollipops, when you sucked em down there was a naked woman inside. He must have bought a hundred dollars' worth of that crazy made-in-Taiwan shite, Lisey. Do you remember?"

She did. Most of all she remembered how he had looked coming home that day, his arms full of bags with laughing cartoon faces and the words LAFF RIOT printed all over them. How full of color his cheeks had been. And shite was what he'd called it, not shit but shite, that was one word he picked up from her, could you believe it. Well, turnabout was fair play, so Good Ma had liked to claim, although shite had been their Dad's word, as it had been Dandy Dave who would sometimes tell folks a thing was no good, so I slang it forth. How Scott had loved it, said it had a weight coming off the tongue that I threw it away or even I flung it away could never hope to match.

Scott with his catches from the word-pool, the story-pool, the myth-pool.

Scott smucking Landon.

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

8

Amanda brightening up was the first good thing. Munsinger, the doctor on duty, was no grizzled vet, that was the second good thing. He didn't look as young as Jantzen, the doc Lisey met during Scott's final illness, but if he was much beyond thirty, she'd be surprised. The third good thing - although she'd never have believed it if anyone had told her in advance - was the arrival of the car-accident folks from down the road in Sweden.

They weren't there when Lisey and Darla escorted Amanda into the Stephens Memorial ER; then the waiting room was empty except for a kid of ten or so and his mother. The kid had a rash and his mother kept snapping at him not to scratch it.

She was still snapping when the two of them were called back to one of the examining rooms. Five minutes later the kid reappeared with bandages on his arms and a glum look on his face. Mom had some sample tubes of ointment and was still yapping.

The nurse called Amanda's name. "Dr. Munsinger will see you now, dear." She pronounced the last word in the Maine fashion, so that it rhymed with Leah.