Living Witness(9)

She turned around to see that Lyman hadn’t heard her. He was taking out a small stack of hamburger patties to make ready on the grill. It was edging on up to eleven o’clock. Alice shrugged and headed out to the floor again.

People as old as Annie-Vic died all the time, she thought.

Hell. Most people as old as Annie-Vic were already dead.



5



Judy Cornish was sure there were many wonderful things about living in Snow Hill, Pennsylvania. There was the landscape, for one. Before they’d come out here, Judy had thought that big green spaces like this, full of trees and not much in the way of roads, had become restricted to national parks. It was—interesting—to find out that some people lived their lives in the middle of green, especially on the East Coast. Judy was from the state of Washington, originally. Until two years ago, she’d thought of “the East” as a collection of industrial cities and their high-priced suburbs. Snow Hill was not a suburb. It didn’t come close.

The other thing Judy thought was wonderful about living in Snow Hill was the price of housing. They’d never been able to afford the kind of house they had here in any of Dan’s other postings. Hell, in Palo Alto, they’d barely been able to afford much more than a matchbox, and in Houston they’d found enough space for the new baby only by saddling Dan with ninety-minute commute. Now they had enough space for all three of their children, and more. They had a six-thousand-square-foot Victorian that had taken only a little time to fix up, including a kitchen the size of their first apartment and a big curving stairway that looked as if it should have debutantes parading down it. Judy loved her house. She loved the stained-glass windows in the ground-floor alcove and the high ceilings in the master bedroom. She loved the walk-up attic, which they had converted to a play room for the children. The attic had a round turret the children could pretend was a medieval castle. Really, the house was perfect. Or it would have been, if it had only been located someplace in civilization.

The parking lot at the Adams IGA was not anywhere near empty enough, Judy could see that right off, and she could tell—from the sudden stiffening of Shelley Niederman’s body—that Shelley was thinking the same thing herself. It wasn’t a big parking lot, and it wasn’t full, but at least half the spaces were occupied, and none of them were occupied by the right kind of car. Judy had learned to read the cars over these last few months, when she and Shelley had gone from being just odd people living in the development to The Enemy. The right kind of car was one like her own, a Volvo Cross Country station wagon, or a Saab, or even a Subaru Forester, although that last one was sometimes iffy. People out here didn’t hate Subarus they way they hated Volvos. The wrong kind of car was a Chevy Cavalier, or a Ford Focus, or, the very worst, any kind of pickup truck made by an American car company. God. Judy had told her share of pickup truck jokes in college, and she and Dan had even gone to see Jeff Foxworthy on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour, but for some reason she’d never thought of any of it as real until she’d come here. It really shouldn’t have been real. It really shouldn’t have been the case that anybody on earth should want to be the kind of person the people here both were and thought was just plain fine.

That last sentence made no sense. Grammar and syntax seemed to be two of the casualties of her stay in Snow Hill. They were getting to her, these people were. They were turning her into some kind of ignorant, stupid, low-rent hick.

Judy pulled the Volvo into a parking place sufficiently far from the store and killed the engine and just sat. Beside her in the front passenger seat, Shelley Niederman rubbed the palm of her right hand rhythmically against her right knee. It was one of the things Shelley did when she was nervous and didn’t have room to pace.

“Well,” Judy said.

“Maybe we should take the time and go out to the mall,” Shelley said.

“We don’t have time to go out to the mall,” Judy said. “We talked about it. We’ve got to pick up the food for the meeting and then we’ve got to get some actual work done on organizing the project materials, or the girls are never going to get this thing in in time for the judging. And Mallory has a piano lesson at two, so I’ve got that.”

Mallory was Judy’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She also had an eight year-old daughter named Hannah, and Danny, still small enough to be wearing a diaper in a child-protective seat in the back. Judy looked at him in the rearview mirror. He was asleep.

“Still,” Shelley said.

Judy took her keys out of the ignition and put them in the inside pocket of her Coach Basic Bag. She’d always had Coach bags, but she’d had to order this one online, because the nearest Coach store to Snow Hill was in Harrisburg. Actually, it was worse than that. The nearest Starbucks was forty-five minutes away, at that same mall Shelley wanted to drive to, and that was the nearest place with a decent bookstore, too. It was as if they’d been dropped down on an alien planet, stuck not only in the 1950s, but in the 1950s in the hinterlands. Judy kept expecting Jethro Bodine to show up at any minute.