Drawn Into Darkness(78)

“Then do it!”

I found that when I filled a large pot with water, I had no strength to lift it. Surely the gentleman of the house should have taken care of that task for me. But I did not ask. Instead, I slopped out most of the water, put the pot on the stove, turned the burner on, then added more water by trudging back and forth to the sink with a margarine tub like a one-woman bucket brigade, with California Blend on my head yet. Stoat gave occasional staccato bursts of laughter. Betweentimes I could feel him watching me, but I did not waste the energy to turn my head and look at him sitting there at my kitchen table with his shotgun and his ice pack. I salted the water, left it to boil, stuck the meat in the nuker to thaw, and found another big pot to make the sauce in. Normally I would have chopped an onion. In no way, shape, or form could anything about this occasion be considered normal. Forget the onion. I scraped and crumbled thawed meat into the second pot and started it browning. Put the meat’s frozen core back in the nuker to thaw some more. Then I tried to open the jar of sauce.

Crap. I couldn’t.

I simply did not have enough strength to twist that lid off. Too punch-drunk. I tried again, my improvised ice pack slid off my head to splat on the floor, and the jar slid on the countertop but did not submit to me. Next I would knock it onto the floor, break it, and then where would I be? I had only the one jar of sauce. I knew I should ask Stoat to open it. And I knew damn well I couldn’t. No way.

He knew it too. He knew exactly the predicament I was in, and it tickled his—his grits, I suppose. Through the ringing in my ears I heard him laughing, laughing while cheering as if the spaghetti sauce and I were meeting in the octagon, the “cage.” “C’mon, Lee Anna! You act like you can do anything. Super cow! No, make that sow! Hey, c’mon, super sow!” His laughter grew darker. “Open that damn jar or I will shove this shotgun right up your fat ass so it don’t need no silencer.”

As if my own weakness did not frighten me enough already?

Carefully fumbling, I managed to lift the damnable jar in both unsteady hands and take it to the sink, where I blasted its lid with hot water while I regarded it with malice. My back to Stoat, I gave it the evil eye I did not dare show him. I had been knocked out and was staggering around without even a big mouth to save me; if things got much worse, I’d be dying on the floor; and at this moment a pernicious inanimate object had turned stubborn on me? I hated it. I hated that spaghetti sauce jar with an irrational passion, transferring to it all my repressed feelings about Stoat. It was that contemptible jar taunting me, that nasty jar sniggering in triumph over me. Screw the thing! In a paroxysm of fury I seized it and wrung its neck.

The lid popped off.

Stoat crowed with laughter. “Attagirl, Lee Anna! You show it who’s boss! Jesus, if you could see your own face!”

If I were not suddenly so weak again, I would have thrown it at him as I had once seen my mother throw a can of sliced beets at my father in a moment when he had pushed her too far. Aiming it like a football, she’d gotten a nice spiral on it so that clots of bloody red splashed the wall, the ceiling, the other wall, the floor—

“Well, get a move on!” Stoat interrupted my reverie.

The microwave dinged, cuing me to get out the rest of the meat and crumble it into the pan to brown. Hazily I became aware that the pot of water was boiling, and I put the spaghetti in there. When the meat was browned, I dumped the sauce on top of it and stirred. I made my spaghetti sauce in a deep pot so it wouldn’t splatter the whole stove. This was my sole claim to culinary genius. I turned to the cupboards—

Stoat barked, “What now?”

Cupboard alert, sir. I made an effort to remember the names of the items I needed and enunciate them clearly. “Colander, plate, fork.”

“Sir!”

Terror energized me. “Sir, I need to get out a colander, a plate, and a fork for you to eat with, sir.”

“What the hell is a colander?”

“Spaghetti drainer, sir.”

“Well, why the hell didn’t you say that?”

“Chronic undifferentiated vocabulary overuse, sir. Do you prefer your spaghetti al dente, sir?”

“Who the hell is Al Dante?”

Luckily I had no sense of humor left at all. Goddess only knows what would have happened if I had laughed at him. Flat-faced, I spooned out a strand of the spaghetti, which was actually linguine, and tasted it. Unfortunately it required several more minutes of cooking. “It’s going to be a while,” I remarked, adding, “sir.”

Stoat menaced with the shotgun. “Hurry it up.”

But there is no way to hurry linguine. I couldn’t warp the space-time/pasta continuum just to placate Stoat. And I was wondering how to break this to him when I heard a distant, unexpected noise.