Charlotte said, “I’ll wash the dishes if you can do that twice in a row.”
“You toss it into my mouth once, and I’ll wash dishes for a week.”
“Deal.” Charlotte took aim, weighing her options: bean Samantha in the face on purpose or really try to get it into her mouth?
Gamma was back. “Charlie, don’t throw utensils at your sister. Sam, help me look for that frying pan I bought the other day.”
The table was already set, but Charlotte didn’t want to be enlisted into the search. The boxes smelled like mothballs and cheesy dog feet. She straightened the plates. She re-lined up the forks. They were going to have spaghetti tonight, so they would need knives because Gamma always undercooked the noodles and they clumped together like strands of tendons.
“Sam.” Gamma had started coughing again. She pointed toward the air conditioner. “Turn that thing on so we can get some air moving in here.”
Samantha looked at the giant box in the window like she’d never seen an air conditioner before. She had been moping since the red-brick house had burned down. Charlotte had been moping, too, but on the inside, because Rusty already felt bad enough without them rubbing it in.
Charlotte picked up an extra paper plate. She tried to fold it into an airplane so that she could give it to her father.
Samantha asked, “What time are we supposed to pick up Daddy from work?”
Gamma said, “He’ll get a ride from somebody at the courthouse.”
Charlotte hoped Lenore would give him a ride. Rusty’s secretary had loaned her a book called Lace, which was about four friends, and one of them was raped by a sheikh, only you don’t know which one, and she got pregnant and no one told the daughter what happened until she was an adult and she got really rich and she asked them, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”
“Well, shit.” Gamma stood up. “I hope you girls don’t mind being vegetarian tonight.”
“Mom.” Charlotte dropped down into the chair. She put her head in her hands, feigning sickness in hope of soliciting a can of soup for dinner instead. “My stomach hurts.”
Gamma asked, “Don’t you have homework?”
“Chemistry.” Charlotte looked up. “Can you help me?”
“It’s not rocket science.”
Charlotte asked, “Do you mean, it’s not rocket science, so I should be able to figure it out on my own, or do you mean, it’s not rocket science, and that is the only science that you know how to perform, and so therefore you cannot help me?”
“There were too many conjunctions in that sentence,” Gamma said. “Go wash your hands.”
“I believe I had a valid question.”
“Now.”
Charlotte ran into the hall. It was so long that you could stand in the kitchen and treat it as a bowling alley. At least that was what Gamma said, and that was exactly what Charlotte was going to do as soon as she could get a ball.
She opened one of the five doors and found the stairs to the yucky basement. She tried another and found the hallway to the bachelor farmer’s scary bedroom.
“Fudge!” Charlotte bellowed, but only for Gamma’s sake.
She opened another door. The chiffarobe. Charlotte grinned, because she was playing a joke on Samantha, or maybe not a joke—whatever it was called when you wanted to scare the crap out of somebody.
She was trying to convince her sister that the HP was haunted.
Yesterday, Charlotte had found a weird black-and-white photograph in one of the thrift store boxes. At first, she had started to color it, but she only got as far as yellowing the teeth when she had the idea to stick the picture in the bottom drawer of the chiffarobe for Samantha to find.
Her sister had been appropriately freaked out, probably because the night before, Charlotte creaked the boards outside of her room so that Samantha would follow her down to the scary bedroom where the bachelor farmer had died, where she planted the idea that the old geezer had left the house in body, but not spirit. As in, he was a ghost.
Charlotte tried another door. “Found it!”
She yanked the cord for the light. She pulled down her shorts, but froze when she noticed a sprinkling of blood on the toilet seat.
This wasn’t the blood like Samantha sometimes left when she was having her period. This was a sprinkle, the kind that came out of your mouth when you coughed too hard.
Gamma was coughing too hard a lot.
Charlotte pulled up her shorts. She turned on the faucet and cupped her hands under the water. She splashed the toilet seat to wash away the red spots. Then she saw that there were more red dots on the floor. She threw some water on those, then on the mirror because there was some there, too. Even the moldy edge of the corner shower had been sprayed.
The phone rang in the kitchen. Charlotte waited through two more rings, wondering if they were going to answer it. Gamma wouldn’t let them pick up sometimes because it might be Rusty. She was still upset about the fire, but she wasn’t moping like Samantha. She was screaming, mostly. And she cried, too, but only Charlotte knew about that.
The handle of the ball-peen hammer was soaked by the time Charlotte banged off the faucet. Her butt got wet when she sat down on the toilet seat. Charlotte could see that she had made a mess. Some of the water had turned pink. She pulled up her shorts. She dotted at the water with a wad of toilet paper. The paper began to disintegrate, so she used more. And then she used even more. Paper was supposed to absorb stuff, but all she was doing was creating a giant wad of wet paper that would clog the toilet if she tried to flush it.
Charlotte stood up. She looked around the bathroom. The pink was gone, but there was still a lot of water. The room was kind of damp anyway. The shower mold was something out of a movie with a lagoon where a swamp monster comes out.
In the hall, a box jangled. Sam let out a strangled noise, like she’d stubbed her toe.
“Fudge,” Charlotte said, for real this time. The wad of toilet paper was pink with blood. She shoved it into the front pocket of her shorts. There wasn’t time to pee. She shut the bathroom door behind her. Samantha was ten feet away. Charlotte punched her sister in her arm to distract her from the wet lump in her shorts. Then she galloped the rest of the way up the hall because horses were faster.
“Dinner!” Gamma called. She was standing by the stove when Charlotte cantered into the kitchen.
Charlotte said, “I’m right here.”
“Your sister isn’t.”
Charlotte saw the thick noodles Gamma dug out of the pot with a pair of tongs. “Mom, please don’t make us eat that.”
“I’m not going to let you starve.”
“I could eat a bowl of ice cream.”
“Do you want explosive diarrhea?”
Charlotte got sick from anything that had milk in it, but she was pretty sure the ropey spaghetti would have the same effect. “Mama, what would happen if I ate two bowls of ice cream? Really big ones.”
“Your intestines would burst and you would die.”