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“If it’s Saturday night, probably all you girls will stay up past midnight talking and goofing off and you’ll be too sleepy to go to Sunday school and church the next day.”

“
Mommy
,” Robin said. “Why do you really not want me to go?”

Karen needed a moment to ponder the question. “We’ve never spent a night apart except when you stay at Grandma’s house,” Karen said. “I’ll be lonesome without you.”

“Do you want to come?” Robin invited, and laughed at the image. “You’d have to take Kelly a present.”

“Speaking of which, where do you plan to get the money to buy Kelly something? You know we just don’t have any.” Before Karen had been hit with that hideous ticket for speeding, she’d used up a good chunk of her savings account getting Robin the bicycle, which had been a big mistake, because she couldn’t let Robin ride off on it without supervision, and Robin simply wasn’t the outdoor sort anyhow, preferring to stay in the house most of the time.

“But
Mommy
, it might only be a couple of dollars. If you don’t have it, Grandma would give it to me.”

“She would, and she’d also hop all over me if I wouldn’t let you go, isn’t that a fact?”

Robin smiled. “She could sure make trouble if you wouldn’t.”

It was hard enough to raise a child without help from a spouse. But it was harder to raise a child with too much help from a parent. Karen’s mother had her own ideas about childrearing…which hadn’t been so bad, as far as Karen herself had developed. Louisa Spurlock believed that only God should supervise the comings and goings and growing of a kid, that leaving well enough alone and in God’s hands was all the watching-out that a parent needed to do. But Louisa still enjoyed the help and companionship of a husband, although Grandpa Spurlock wasn’t Karen’s father and therefore not the real forebear of the golden-haired beauty whom he doted on so much. Leo Spurlock was so infatuated with Robin that it made Karen uneasy. She had stopped just short of telling Robin not to sit on her grandfather’s lap.

Men, Karen was convinced, were mostly creeps. The world was full of old goats who couldn’t think of anything else but sex, unless it was simply ways to make the opposite sex feel miserable. Her boss, Mr. Purvis, had tried so many times to get into her pants that she’d finally had to report him to the police, and this lecherous cop had sneered and drooled as he explained to her that she wouldn’t have a case without witnesses and it was pretty hard to prove anyhow and his advice was, if she couldn’t stand the thought of giving old Purvis a little enjoyment, to just try not to get into a situation she couldn’t get out of.

Cops were just as bad, or worse, than the bad guys. Take that jerk she’d seen again this afternoon, buying out the store, that Sergeant Alan of the state police. He had given her the ticket for going a little too fast on a stretch of Highway 65 where everybody else was going the same speed she was. That guy was a typical tough, unfeeling, uncouth law officer: getting into middle age, paunchy, thick, the image of a redneck, and probably the owner of an extensive private collection of pornography.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he’d asked her when he stopped her.

“No, I don’t,” she’d said honestly.

He’d laughed and said, “Then I can write anything I want on this ticket, can’t I?”

“Why are you picking on
me
?” she’d asked him. “All those other people are going the same speed I was.”

“What other people?” he’d said.

“Look!” she’d said, and pointed. “Look at that guy! He’s going faster than I was.”

“I’ll catch him,” he’d said, and had finished writing out the ticket for her.

Robin was eating her salad quickly, to get it out of the way before touching the spaghetti. Robin hated salad, or anything green, but Karen had demanded that she eat what was good for her, so Robin had developed a habit of quickly finishing anything she didn’t like before starting on what she did like.

Karen reflected that if she’d flirted with that cop, maybe he would have let her off. Or maybe not. Maybe he had a quota to fill, so many tickets to write each day, in order to earn his bonuses and feed that family of thirty-seven that he was buying all that food for. Karen shook her head, and laughed.

“What’s funny?” Robin asked.

“I was just thinking about a man at the store today who bought a whole case—that’s twenty-four quart jars—of pickled pigs’ feet.”

“What’s
that
?” Robin wanted to know.

“When they butcher hogs and take off all the bacon and hams and good parts, they’ve got leftovers like feet, which they preserve by pickling, and sell cheaply.”

“Ew,” Robin said. “That’s gross.”

“You’ve never had any, and I hope you never have to.”

“What did he look like?” Robin asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Anybody who eats lots of pickled pigs’ feet must look weird. Maybe like a monster.”

“He’s a state trooper,” Karen said, “although he wasn’t in uniform.” She attempted to describe him: mid-forties, strong build but potbellied, plain grizzled brown hair, bushy eyebrows. “He might not look weird but he certainly wasn’t good-looking. Just an old country boy without a brain in his head. He was buying case loads of everything. Maybe the state police are going to have a big picnic.”

Robin laughed, and said, “A zillion pigs chomping on pigs’ feet!” Then she said, “Let’s not get off the subject, okay?”

“What subject?”

“I want to go to Kelly’s slumber party.”

Karen sighed. This was going to be difficult. She tried to tell herself that Kelly’s parents, whom she’d never met, were thoroughly responsible people and would do a proper job of riding herd on the party. They would make sure nobody got hurt and that all of them behaved themselves, as much as girls of seven and eight possibly could. Maybe the parents would even make sure the kids put out the lights and went to sleep before dawn came. Still, Karen would worry herself sick the whole time Robin was away.

The whole idea just wouldn’t work. Robin had a daily schedule that she was required to observe, from the time she woke up until the time she went to bed, that included her chores around the house and her homework, as well as her “fun” things like watching television and reading comic books and talking on the telephone and playing with her paper dolls, most of which she’d made herself. She was particularly responsible for strict observance of the rules while Karen was at work and Robin was home alone. She was not allowed to invite her friends over unless Karen was home. Robin had memorized the numbers for the fire department, the family doctor, the police, and Karen’s place of employment. Robin was allowed to use the vacuum cleaner but not the toaster, the electric can opener, the mixer or the stove.

Robin was permitted to check the mailbox quickly when the school bus dropped her off, but then she had to go directly to the front door and unlock it with her key that was kept in a special pocket under the lid of her lunchbox. Karen had timed her: it took only twenty seconds for her to step down from the bus, glance into the mailbox and then walk to the front door and, before unlocking it, check the house for any sign of a broken window or anything that didn’t look right. Karen had requested that the bus driver wait those twenty seconds until Robin was inside before driving off. If Robin noticed
anything
about the house that didn’t look right, she was supposed to get back onto the bus and ride back to the school and phone for Karen from there. After actually entering the house and locking it from the inside, including the deadbolt, Robin was supposed to give the house its inspection, looking for anything amiss: back door ajar or unlocked, windows not closed, any smell of smoke or gas or anything suspicious.

If anyone phoned for Karen while she was gone, unless it was Grandma, Robin was required to tell the caller that Karen couldn’t come to the phone and to take a message, and never to tell the caller that she was home alone. Robin was not to unlock the door for anyone except Grandma and Grandpa, and they had a special code knock which Grandpa called shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits; a rhythm of knocks that was easily recognizable, so if Robin heard a voice on the other side of the door saying, “Open up, it’s your Grandma,” even if it
sounded
just like Grandma, she was not to open the door unless she’d heard that code knock.

Despite all these rules and procedures, Karen still worried constantly about leaving Robin home alone. And today Robin had violated her routine by coming to the store to meet Karen instead of taking the school bus home. That was not excusable, and Karen considered punishing Robin for it by forbidding her from attending the birthday sleep-over. If nothing else could persuade Robin to back down, Karen might have to resort to that.

“Did you just walk from school to the store?” Karen asked her daughter. Robin nodded. It was only a few blocks from Woodland Heights Elementary to the store, but still, Robin knew she was not allowed to walk alone. “That’s not permitted, you know. You must never forget ‘stranger danger.’”

“I never forget,” Robin said.

“What if a man had driven up beside you and told you that I was in the hospital and he’d been sent to pick you up?”

“I would’ve told him that I know where the hospital is and I could walk there by myself, thank you very much.”

Karen smiled. “That’s good, but what if he had tried to get out and grab you?”

“I would have given him a
chagi
in the nuts.”

“A
what
in the
what
?”

Robin stood up from the table and said, “
Chagi
means kick in taekwondo. Watch.” And she delivered a swift kick into the groin of an imaginary man who somehow took the form of mean old Sergeant Alan in Karen’s mind.

“I didn’t know you knew those words,” Karen said.

“And if that doesn’t crumple him up,” Robin declared, “I’ll give him a
chireugi
right in his windpipe.” And she demonstrated, making a spear of her fingers and thrusting them toward his neck.

Karen flinched. “Wow. That hurt, I bet.”

Robin dusted her hands together, and sat back down. “Next question.”

“I wish you wouldn’t drum your fingers on the table,” Karen said. It was a bad habit that had gotten worse in recent months. On one hand, it was clear proof that a career as a concert pianist was waiting for Robin, if only they could afford piano lessons. On the other hand, it was annoying and showed a complete lack of patience. “Tell you what,” Karen offered, “if you’ll clean your room, and I mean
clean
it, I’ll give you two dollars to buy Kelly a birthday present.”

Robin thought about that. “You mean that I could
take
to the party?”

“How else would you get it there? Mail it?”

Chapter four

F
ew things frightened her. She was scared of thunder but not of the lightning that went with it. Thinking about this, and about the explanation that her mother had tried to give her about the connection between lightning and thunder, how the latter is the sound of the former (even though this was hard to grasp because she often saw the lightning long before she heard the thunder), she decided that what most frightened her about thunder was the noise. Not just because it was so crashing and booming but because it was inexplicable. What was
happening
? Was the whole world blowing up and coming to an end? She had lived through many thunderstorms and always found that the next day the world was just as it had always been, but every time she heard a sudden loud noise (gunshots too and, at least once in her short life, the fireworks that accompany July 4
^th
) the sound seemed to be suggesting mass destruction.

And because she was not afraid of the lightning, or of any sudden light, or of light in any of its forms (not even the moon, although it sometimes seemed to be an intruder), she was not afraid of the absence of light either. The dark did not bother her at all. This seemed to her an unreasonable lack of fear, when she ought to be rightly apprehensive about all the unseen things out there in the dark which could cause her harm. Often she could hear them, and smell them without being able to see them, but she reflected that their odor and their sound were fearsome but not their invisibility. She hated the high-pitched echo-shrieking of bats; she knew they had to do it to find their way around in the dark, but she couldn’t stand the sound of it.

She didn’t need to make any sounds to find her way around in the dark, and so now she trotted easily and effortlessly down the remains of the old logging trail that meandered up the north face of Madewell Mountain. But her tongue, hanging out of her mouth to catch all the night’s fragrances, was becoming dry. She was very thirsty, and hoped she’d soon catch a sniff of a spring bubbling out of the earth, or a rivulet in a ravine, and she realized too it was well past her suppertime, with no prospect of anything to eat in the offing. Sure, she could catch a squirrel or a rabbit, or even one of the night birds whose plaintive advertisements for a mate filled the air sweetly with pleasant sounds, but the simple fact was that she had never in her life killed a thing. Not a thing. Well, of course she’d caused the demise of various fleas who had burrowed into her coat and fallen victim to her chomping. But that was self-protective murder.

She encountered along the trail many creatures, edible and inedible, none of whom could understand her attempts to communicate with them: a porcupine, a green turtle, an armadillo, a family of raccoons, and a possum. In the dark she could see clearly enough to tell what an ugly creature the possum was, but she knew from experience that possums were good folk, and friendly, and she was sorry she didn’t know their language. Overhead were flying squirrels whose sounds were too mild to frighten her but noisy enough to be distracting. There was also an occasional owl, whose hoot stopped her in her tracks and reversed her ears.

After a long time the logging trail met up with a larger trail, a dirt road, and she came to a habitation. She and the other dog caught wind of each other at the same instant. The other loudly announced her name: “Arphrowf!”