better.”
Amy realized that Liz was right. She leaned back in the booth, away
from the table, and a wave of resignation swept through her. She
sagged as if she were a marionette whose strings had been cut.
“Okay.
The sooner the better. I’ll tell them tonight or tomorrow.”
“Tonight.” “I don’t think I have the strength for it tonight. If I’m
going to put on a big suicide act, I’ll need to have my wits about
me.
I’ll have to be rested.” “Tomorrow, then,” Liz said. “No later than
tomorrow. Get it over with. Listen, we have a great summer coming
up.
If I go west at the end of the year, like I’m hoping to, this’ll
probably be the last summer you and I will have together. So we’ve got
to do it up right.
We’ve got to make a lot of memories to last us a long while. Lots of
sun, some good dope to smoke, a couple of new guys . . . It’ll be a
blast. Except it won’t be so terrific if you’re walking around all
bloated and preggy.”
For Joey Harper, Sunday turned out to be a fine day.
The morning started with Mass and Sunday school, of course, which was
as boring as usual, but then the day improved rapidly. When his father
stopped at Royal City News for the Sunday papers, Joey found a batch of
new comic books on the rack and had enough coins in his pockets to buy
the two best issues.
Then his mother made chicken and waffles for lunch, which was one of
his favorite things in the whole wide world.
After lunch his father gave him money to go to the Rialto. That was a
theater, a revival house that played only old movies.
It was six blocks from their house, and he was allowed to ride his
bicycle that far, but no farther. The Rialto was showing two monster
flicks for the Sunday matinee–The Thing and It Came from Outer
Space.
Both pictures were super.
Joey liked scary stories. He wasn’t exactly sure why he did.
Sometimes, sitting in a dark theater, watching some slimy thing creep
up on the hero, Joey almost peed in his pants. But he loved every
minute of it.
After the movies he went home for dinner, and his mother made
cheeseburgers and baked beans, which was even better than chicken and
waffles, better than just about anything he could think of. He ate
until he thought he’d bust.
Amy came home from The Dive at eight o’clock, an hour and a half before
Joey’s bedtime, so that he was still awake when she found the rubber
snake hanging in her closet. She stormed down the hall, calling his
name, and she chased him around his room until she caught him. After
she had tickled him and had made him promise never to frighten her that
way again (a promise they both knew he wouldn’t keep), he persuaded her
to play a sixty-minute time-limit game of Monopoly, and that was a
whole lot of fun. He beat her, as usual, for an almost grown-up
person, she sure didn’t know much about financial wheeling and
dealing.
He loved Amy more than anybody. Maybe that was wrong of him. You were
supposed to love your mother and father most of all. Well, after
God.
God came first.
Then your mother and father. But Mama was hard to love. She was all
the time praying with you or praying for you or giving you a lecture on
the proper way to behave, and she told you over and over again that she
cared that you grew up the right way, but she somehow never showed you
that she cared. It was all talk. Daddy was easier to love, but he
wasn’t around that much.
He was busy doing law stuff, probably saving innocent men from the
electric chair and things like that, and when he was home he spent a
lot of time alone, working on the miniature layouts he built for model
trains, he didn’t like you messing around in his workshop.
Which left Amy. She was there a lot. And she was always there when