Living Witness(82)

Barbie was in the living room, on the couch, whimpering. They’d given her painkillers at the hospital, but those were going to wear off in another hour or two. She’d need something more, and something stronger than Advil. Alice hated the very idea of going into town. She didn’t even want to go into the diner, and she would have to do that. Lyman couldn’t run the place by himself. It would be full of people now, too, just the way they had expected it to be when the trial started next week. Those newspeople would come in and swarm this murder. They’d interview everybody. They’d want to interview her. She was a member of the school board. She was on the side of Right and Good. Of course they’d want to interview her. They’d want to make her look like a fool.

“Mama?” Barbie said from the other room.

Alice looked around. She was standing in her own kitchen. She was never in her kitchen in the middle of the day, except on Sundays, because they didn’t open the diner on Sundays. Let them go to the mall and eat at one of those places that were run by corporations that didn’t care about the Sabbath, or about honoring the Lord, or about anything. Let them do whatever they wanted to do. She just wished that Holman had been elected to the school board instead of that stuck-up snobby Annie-Vic Hadley. If Holman had been on the board, none of this would have happened.

“Mama,” Barbie said again.

Alice made herself move. Her house looked nice in the sunlight. They painted the inside every other year, because Alice didn’t like dirt, and she didn’t like dinge, and she didn’t like coming home to the smell of futility, either. She just wished sometimes that they could do something with the living room like those houses in the development, the ones with the high ceilings that went up and up and ended in skylights. This house had been in Lyman’s family for as long as anybody could remember, at least as long as Annie-Vic’s house had been in hers. It was a family heirloom, or something. But it wasn’t like Annie-Vic’s house, either.

“Mama, please,” Barbie said.

Alice made herself move. To get to the kitchen you had to go through the dining room. The house was only fifteen hundred square feet. In the dining room there was a long table and six chairs, all passed down to her by Lyman’s mother, and all made in Grand Rapids, too. Alice remembered when that used to mean something, and when Lyman’s family had been so much better off than hers. The time when she was growing up had been better. There was no development then, and there was Annie-Vic only some of the time. She was always off doing something somewhere. Showing us up, Alice thought, and then she pushed that firmly out of her mind. There was no way that somebody like Annie-Vic could show her up. There was nothing on earth that was better or more valuable than good ordinary folks living their lives and minding their own business while those people, people like Annie-Vic, went running around trying to ruin everything.

The living room was long and narrow, but it had a fireplace with a fancy white mantel where they could hang stockings every Christmas. Alice believed in doing Christmas big. She liked to have the house decorated and she liked to have lights on the trees outside. What would happen to this country when the secular humanists had abolished Christmas and everybody had to live through the entire long month of December, in the dark and the cold and the awful weather, with nothing to look forward to?

The couch Barbie was lying on had been bought new at Sears five years ago. It needed to be reupholstered. Alice hadn’t noticed that before. Barbie had a cast up to her knee, a big thick one. The leg with the cast was up on the arm of the couch, because she was supposed to keep it elevated.

“Mama,” she said, when Alice came in.

“I was just going to call your father and have him come out and get this prescription,” Alice said. “He can run out and get it and then run back into town and give it in at the pharmacy, and then Mr. Carr can send it over. I don’t like the idea of leaving you here alone.”

“I didn’t bother her,” Barbie said. “I really didn’t bother her, Mama. I knew her mother was murdered. Everybody knew it. I was just walking along minding my own business and going to class and then she was just there. And she slapped me.”

“Well,” Alice said, trying very hard to be fair. “Her mother had just died. She probably wasn’t thinking straight.”

“She said some things,” Barbie said. “She said there wasn’t any God. She said that all that happened after you died was that your body went into the ground and worms came out of it.”

“She’s afraid her mother is going to go to Hell, that’s all that was,” Alice said. “Having your body rot in the ground is a lot better than going to Hell. If you rot in the ground you can’t really feel anything. If you go to Hell, all you feel is pain and it’s the worst pain in the world and it goes on for eternity. It never stops for even one instant.”