“But we were partners! We won the canasta game together! And I didn’t have any money to put up, remember?”
That accusation, for that’s what I meant it to be, only made her wedge herself more firmly behind the steering wheel of the DeSoto. “Now, now, don’t make such a fuss. If I were to give you your share, as you call it, what would you spend it on? Comic books, movies, things like that, which are like throwing money away.”
Things like that were exactly what I wanted to spend mad money on, and I tried to say so without saying so. “I can’t go through the whole summer just sitting around the house doing nothing.”
“That is hardly the case,” she didn’t give an inch. “I’ll take you shopping with me, you can be my little helper at the grocery store and so on. Then there’s the jigaw puzzle now that you’ve learned canasta, and always the greenhouse to visit, isn’t there.” Her voice went way up musically as she said the next. “Don’t worry, bunny, you won’t lack for entertainment if you just put your mind to it. And here’s a surprise for you.” By now she was cooing persuasion at me. “On the Fourth, we’ll go to the park, where they’ll have fireworks and sizzlers and whizbangs and all those things, and hear that wonderful Lawrence Welk orchestra Herta talked about. Won’t that be nice?”
Talking to me that way, who did she think I was, Biggie the budgie? But before I could think up a better retort, she let out an alarming sigh as if the air were going out of her. I saw she was stricken, for sure, but not in an emergency way. Everything about her appeared normal enough, except her eyes were not on the road, her attention seized by something we were passing.
“I’m sorry, buttercup,” she apologized in another expulsion of breath, “but the sight of it always almost does me in.”
I jerked my head around to where she was looking, expecting a hospital or cemetery at the worst, some place ordinarily sad to see. But no, I saw why the sight so unnerved her, as it did me. The forbidding old building set back from the street was spookily familiar, even though I was positive I had never seen it before. The sprawling structure, rooms piled three stories high, each with a single narrow window, seemed leftover and rundown and yet clinging to life like the skinny little trees, maybe a failing orchard, that dotted its grounds like scarecrows.
“What is that place?” I heard my own voice go high.
“Just what it looks like,” Aunt Kate responded, speeding up the car to leave the ghostly sight behind. “The poorhouse.”
? ? ?
THE WORD STRUCK me all the way through as I stared over my shoulder at the creepy building. Put a rocky butte behind it and weather-beaten outbuildings around it and it was the county poorfarm of my nightmares. As if caught up in the worst of those even though I was awake, I heard Aunt Kate’s pronouncement that made my skin crawl.
“And that’s another reason I must be careful, careful, careful with money and impress on you to do the same. I sometimes think we’ll end up there if a certain somebody doesn’t change his ways.”
“Y-you mean Herman?”
“Him himself,” she said, squeezing the life out of the steering wheel.
“But—why?” I was stupefied. “How’s he gonna end you up in the poorfarm—I mean house?”
“Have you ever seen that man do a lick of work? If only,” she said grimly. Another sigh as if she were about to collapse scared me as much as the first one. “To think, what a difference it would make if Fritzie was here.”
“Huh? Who?”
“Oh, the other one,” she tossed that off as if it were too sad to go into.
No way was she getting away with that. My burning gaze at her was not going to quit until she answered its question, The other what?
She noticed, and said offhandedly, “Husband, who else?”
I gaped at her. She seemed like the least likely person to believe the plural of spouse is spice, as I’d overheard grown-ups say about Mormons and people like that.
“You’ve got another one besides Herman? They let you do that in Wisconsin?”
“Silly. Before Brinker, I mean.” She gazed through the windshield. “Fritz Schmidt. A real man.”
Herman seemed real enough to me. “What happened to him? The other one, I mean.”
“I lost him.” She made it sound as if he had dropped out of her pocket somewhere.
Not satisfied, I again stared until she had to answer. “Storm, slick deck.”
“Really?” Strange how these things work, but Herman’s shake of the sugar bowl that spilled some over the side when he was showing me the fate of the Badger Voyager combined with her words to make my pulse race. Trying not to sound eager, though I was, I leaned across the seat and asked, “Like when the Witch of November came?”