out a circular bone saw. The cops, realizing what she was going to do, turned away.
The vet cut off the Saint Bernard’s head and put it in a large white plastic garbage bag. Later that day it was forwarded to the State Commissioner of Animals, where the brain would be tested for rabies.
So Cujo was gone, too.
It was quarter to four that afternoon when Holly called Charity to the telephone. Holly looked mildly worried. “It sounds like somebody official,” she said. About an hour earlier, Brett had given in to Jim Junior’s endless supplications and had accompanied his young cousin down to the playground at the Stratford Community Center.
Since then the house had been silent except for the women’s voices as they talked over old times-the good old times, Charity amended silently. The time Daddy had fallen off the haytruck and gone into a great big cowflop in Back Field (but no mention of the times he had beaten them until they couldn’t sit down in payment for some real or imagined transgression); the time they had snuck into the old Met Theater in Lisbon Palls to see Elvis in Love Me Tender (but not the time Momma had had her credit cut off at the Red & White and had backed out of the grocery in tears, leaving a full basket of provisions behind and everybody watching); how Red Timmins from up the road was always trying to kiss Holly on their way back from school (but not how Red had lost an arm when his tractor turned turtle on him in August of 1962). The two of them had discovered it was all right to open the closets . . . as long as you didn’t poke too far back in them. Because things might still be lurking there, ready to bite.
Twice, Charity had opened her mouth to tell Holly that she and Brett would be going home tomorrow, and both times she had closed it again, trying to think of a way she could say it without leading Holly to believe they didn’t like it here.
Now the problem was momentarily forgotten as she sat at the telephone table, a fresh cup of tea beside her. She felt a little anxious-nobody likes to get a telephone call while they’re on vacation from someone who sounds official “Hello?” she said.
Holly watched her sister’s face go white, listened as her sister said, “What? What? No . . . not There must be some mistake. I tell you, there must—”
She fell silent, listening to the telephone. Some dreadful news was being passed down the wire from Maine, Holly thought. She could see it in the gradually tightening mask of her sister’s face, although she could hear nothing from the phone itself except a series of meaningless squawks.
Bad news from Maine. To her it was an old story. It was all right for her and Charity to sit in the sunny morning kitchen, drinking tea and eating orange sections and talking about sneaking into the Met Theater. It was all right, but it didn’t change the fact that every day she could remember of her childhood had brought a little piece of bad news with it, each piece a part of her early life’s jigsaw, the whole picture so terrible that she would not really have minded if she had never seen her older sister again. Torn cotton underpants that the other girls at school made fun of. Picking potatoes until her back ached and if you stood up suddenly the blood rushed out of your head so fast you felt like you were going to faint. Red Timmins—how carefully she and Charity had avoided mentioning Red’s arm, so badly crushed it had to be amputated, but when Holly heard she had been glad, so glad. Because she remembered Red throwing a green apple at her one day, hitting her in the face, making her nose bleed, making her cry. She remembered Red giving her Indian rubs and laughing. She remembered an occasional nourishing dinner of Shedd’s Peanut Butter and Cheerios when things were particularly bad. She remembered the way the outhouse stank in high summer, that smell was shit, and in case you should wonder, that wasn’t a good smell.
Bad news from Maine. And somehow, for some crazed reason she knew they would never discuss even if they both lived to be a hundred and spent the last twenty old-maid years together, Charity had elected to stick with that life. Her