Needful Things (25 page)

She could hardly believe her ears at Leland Gaunt's reply. “Because this is my first week, why don't we call it two for the price of one? Here you are, my dear—enjoy it.”

Her shock was so great that she almost dropped the vase on the floor when he put it in her hand.

“What . . . I thought you said . . .”

“You heard me correctly,” he said, and she suddenly found she could not take her eyes away from his.
Francie was wrong about them,
she thought in a distant,
preoccupied sort of way.
They're not green at all. They're gray. Dark gray.
“There
is
one other thing, though.”

“Is there?”

“Yes—do you know a Sheriff's Deputy named Norris Ridgewick?”

The little silver bell tinkled.

Everett Frankel, the Physician's Assistant who worked with Dr. Van Allen, bought the pipe Brian Rusk had noticed on his advance visit to Needful Things for twelve dollars and a prank to be played on Sally Ratcliffe. Poor old Slopey Dodd, the stutterer who attended speech therapy on Tuesday afternoons with Brian, bought a pewter teapot for his mom's birthday. It cost him seventy-one cents . . . and a promise, freely given, that he would play a funny trick on Sally's boyfriend, Lester Pratt. Mr. Gaunt told Slopey he would supply him the few items he would need to play this trick when the time came, and Slopey said that would be ruh-ruh-real g-g-g-good. June Gavineaux, wife of the town's most prosperous dairy farmer, bought a cloisonné vase for ninety-seven dollars and a promise to play a funny trick on Father Brigham of Our Lady of Serene Waters. Not long, after she left, Mr. Gaunt arranged for a somewhat similar trick to be played on the Reverend Willie.

It was a busy, fruitful day, and when Gaunt finally hung the
CLOSED
sign in the window and pulled the shade, he was tired but pleased. Business had been great, and he had even taken a step toward assuring himself he would not be interrupted by Sheriff Pangborn. That was good. Opening was always the most delightful part of his operation, but it was always stressful and could sometimes be risky, as well. He might be wrong about Pangborn, of course, but Gaunt had learned to trust his feelings in such matters, and Pangborn felt like a man he would do well to steer clear of . . . at least until he was ready to deal with the Sheriff on his own terms. Mr. Gaunt reckoned it was going to be an extremely full week, and there would be fireworks before it was over.

Lots of them.

It was quarter past six on Friday evening when Alan turned into Polly's driveway and cut the motor. She was standing at the door, waiting for him, and kissed him warmly. He saw she had donned her gloves for even this brief foray into the cold and frowned.

“Now stop,” she said. “They're a little better tonight. Did you bring the chicken?”

He held up the white grease-spotted bags. “Your servant, dear lady.”

She dropped him a little curtsey. “And yours.”

She took the bags from him and led him into the kitchen. He pulled a chair out from the table, swung it around, and sat on it backwards to watch her as she pulled off her gloves and arranged the chicken on a glass plate. He had gotten it from Cluck-Cluck Tonite. The name was country-horrible, but the chicken was just fine (according to Norris, the clams were a different story). The only problem with take-out when you lived twenty miles away was the cooling factor . . . and that, he thought, was what microwave ovens had been made for. In fact, he believed the only three valid purposes microwaves served were reheating coffee, making popcorn, and putting a buzz under take-out from places like Cluck-Cluck Tonite.

“Are
they better?” he asked as she popped the chicken into the oven and pressed the appropriate buttons. There was no need to be more specific; both of them knew what they were talking about.

“Only a little,” she admitted, “but I'm pretty sure they're going to be a
lot
better soon. I'm starting to feel tingles of heat in the palms, and that's the way the improvement usually starts.”

She held them up. She had been painfully embarrassed by her twisted, misshapen hands at first, and the embarrassment was still there, but she had come a long way toward accepting his interest as a part of his love. He still thought her hands looked stiff and awkward, as if she were wearing invisible gloves—gloves sewn by a crude and uncaring maker who had pulled them on her and then stapled them to her wrists forever.

“Have you had to take any pills today?”

“Only one. This morning,”

She had actually taken three—two in the morning, one in the early afternoon—and the pain was not much better today than it had been yesterday. She was afraid that the tingle of which she had spoken was mostly a figment of her own wistful imagination. She didn't like lying to Alan; she believed that lies and love rarely went together, and never for long. But she had been on her own for a long time, and a part of her was still terrified by his relentless concern. She trusted him, but was afraid to let him know too much.

He had grown steadily more insistent about the Mayo Clinic, and she knew that, if he really understood how bad the pain was this time, he would grow more insistent still. She did not want her goddamned
hands
to become the most important component of their love . . . and she was also afraid of what a consultation at a place like the Mayo might show. She could live with pain; she was not sure if she could live without hope.

“Will you take the potatoes out of the oven?” she asked. “I want to call Nettie before we eat.”

“What's with Nettie?”

“Upset tum. She didn't come in today. I want to make sure it's not intestinal flu. Rosalie says there's a lot of it going around, and Nettie's terrified of doctors.”

And Alan, who knew more of how and what Polly Chalmers thought than Polly ever would have guessed, thought,
Look who's talking, love,
as she went to the telephone. He was a cop, and he could not put away his habits of observation when he was off duty; they were automatic. He no longer even tried. If he had been a little more observant during the last few months of Annie's life, she and Todd might still be alive.

He had noted the gloves when Polly came to the door. He had noted the fact that she had pulled them off with her teeth rather than simply stripping them off hand-for-hand. He had watched her arrange the chicken on the plate, and noted the slight grimace which tightened her mouth when she lifted the plate and put it in the microwave. These were bad signs. He walked to the door between the kitchen and the living room, wanting to watch how
confidently or tentatively she would use the telephone. It was one of the most important ways he had of measuring her pain. And here, at last, he was able to note a good sign—or what he took for one.

She punched Nettie's telephone number quickly and confidently, and because she was on the far side of the room, he was unable to see that this phone—and all the others—had been changed earlier that day to the type with the oversized fingerpads. He went back into the kitchen, keeping one ear cocked toward the living room as he did so.

“Hello, Nettie? . . . I was about to give up. Did I wake you? . . . Yes . . . Uh-huh . . . Well, how is it? . . . Oh, good. I've been thinking of you . . . No, I'm fine for supper, Alan brought fried chicken from that Cluck-Cluck place in Oxford . . . Yes, it was, wasn't it?”

Alan got a platter from one of the cabinets above the kitchen counter and thought: She is lying about her hands. It doesn't matter how well she handles the phone—they're as bad as they've been in the last year, and maybe worse.

The idea that she had lied to him did not much dismay him; his view of truth-bending was a good deal more lenient than Polly's. Take the child, for instance. She had borne it in early 1971, seven months or so after leaving Castle Rock on a Greyhound bus. She had told Alan the baby—a boy she'd named Kelton—had died in Denver, at the age of three months. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—SIDS, the young mother's worst nightmare. It was a perfectly plausible story, and Alan had no doubt whatever that Kelton Chalmers was indeed dead. There was only one problem with Polly's version: it wasn't true. Alan was a cop, and he knew a lie when he heard one.

(except when it was Annie doing it)

Yeah, he thought. Except when it was Annie doing it. Your exception is duly noted for the record.

What had told him Polly was lying? The rapid flicker of her eyelids over her too-wide, too-direct gaze? The way her left hand kept rising to tug at her left earlobe? The crossing and uncrossing of her legs, that child's game signal which meant
I'm fibbing?

All of those things and none of them. Mostly it was just a buzzer that had gone off inside, the way a buzzer in
an airport metal-detector goes off when a guy with a steel plate in his skull steps through.

The lie neither angered nor worried him. There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them . . . and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth. He thought that Polly's lie about Kelton was of this last kind, and he was content to wait. In time, she would decide to show him her secrets. There was no hurry.

No hurry:
the thought itself seemed a luxury.

Her voice—rich and calm and somehow just right as it drifted out of the living room—also seemed a luxury. He was not yet over the guilt of just being here and knowing where all the dishes and utensils were stored, of knowing which bedroom drawer she kept her nylon hose in, or exactly where her summer tan-lines stopped, but none of it mattered when he heard her voice. There was really only one fact that applied here, one simple fact which ruled all others: the sound of her voice was becoming the sound of home.

“I could come over later if you wanted, Nettie . . . You are? . . . Well, rest
is
probably the best thing . . .
Tomorrow?”

Polly laughed. It was a free, pleasing sound that always made Alan feel as if the world had been somehow freshened. He thought he could wait a long time for her secrets to disclose themselves if she would just laugh like that every now and then.

“Gosh, no! Tomorrow's
Saturday!
I'm just going to lie around and be sinful!”

Alan smiled. He pulled out the drawer under the stove, found a pair of pot holders, and opened the conventional oven. One potato, two potato, three potato, four. How in God's name were the two of them supposed to eat four big baked potatoes? But of course he had known there would be too many, because that was the way Polly cooked. There was surely another secret buried in the fact of those four big potatoes, and someday, when he knew all the whys—or most of them, or even some of them—his feelings of guilt and strangeness might pass.

He took the potatoes out. The microwave beeped a moment later.

“I've got to go, Nettie—”

“That's okay!” Alan yelled. “I've got this under control! I'm a policeman, lady!”

“—but you call me if you need anything. You're sure you're okay, now? . . . And you'd tell me if you weren't, Nettie, right? . . . Okay . . . What? . . . No, just asking . . . You too . . . Goodnight, Nettie.”

When she came out, he had set the chicken on the table and was busy turning one of the potatoes inside-out on her plate.

“Alan, you sweetheart! You didn't need to do that!”

“All part of the service, pretty lady.” Another thing he understood was that, when Polly's hands were bad, life became a series of small, hellacious combats for her; the ordinary events of an ordinary life transformed themselves into a series of gruelling obstacles to be surmounted, and the penalty for failure was embarrassment as well as pain. Loading the dishwasher. Stacking kindling in the fireplace. Manipulating a knife and fork to get a hot potato out of its jacket.

“Sit down,” he said. “Let's cluck.”

She burst out laughing and then hugged him. She squeezed his back with her inner forearms instead of her hands, the relentless observer inside noted. But a less dispassionate part of him took notice of the way her trim body pressed against his, and the sweet smell of the shampoo she used.

“You are the dearest man,” she said quietly.

He kissed her, gently at first, then with more force. His hands slid down from the small of her back to the swell of her buttocks. The fabric of her old jeans was as smooth and soft as moleskin under his hands.

“Down, big fella,” she said at last. “Food now, snuggle later.”

“Is that an invitation?” If her hands really weren't better, he thought, she would fudge.

But she said, “Gilt-edged,” and Alan sat down satisfied.

Provisionally.

“Is Al coming home for the weekend?” Polly asked as they cleared away the supper things. Alan's surviving son attended Milton Academy, south of Boston.

“Huh-uh,” Alan said, scraping plates.

Polly said, a little too casually: “I just thought, with no classes Monday because of Columbus Day—”

“He's going to Dorf's place on Cape Cod,” Alan said. “Dorf is Carl Dorfman, his roomie. Al called last Tuesday and asked if he could go down for the three-day weekend. I said okay, fine.”

She touched him on the arm and he turned to look at her. “How much of this is my fault, Alan?”

“How much of
what's
your fault?” he asked, honestly surprised.

“You know what I'm talking about; you're a good father, and you're not stupid. How many times has Al been home since school started again?”

Suddenly Alan understood what she was driving at, and he grinned at her, relieved. “Only once,” he said, “and that was because he needed to talk to Jimmy Catlin, his old computer-hacking buddy from junior high. Some of his choicest programs wouldn't run on the new Commodore 64 I got him for his birthday.”