of the others seemed open and in reasonably good working order.
There had to be some careful thought—but perhaps not too much at once. Things had a way of magnifying themselves.
He turned the radio up and began to think about the poor old Sharp Cereal Professor.
Joe Camber pulled up in front of the Greyhound terminal in Portland at ten minutes to eight. The fog had burned off and the digital clock atop the Casco Bank and Trust read 73 degrees already.
He drove with his hat planted squarely on his head, ready to be angry at anyone who pulled out or cut in front of him. He hated to drive in the city. When he and Gary got to Boston he intended to park the car and leave it until they were ready to come home. They could take the subways if they could puzzle them out, walk if they couldn’t
Charity was dressed in her best pants suit—it was a quiet green—and a white cotton blouse with a ruffle at the neck. She was wearing earrings, and this had filled Brett with a mild sense of amazement. He couldn’t remember his mother wearing earrings at all, except to church.
Brett had caught her alone when she went upstairs to dress after getting Dad his breakfast oatmeal. Joe had been mostly silent, grunting answers to questions in monosyllables, then shutting off conversation entirely by tuning the radio to WCSH for the ball scores. They were both afraid that the silence might presage a ruinous outburst and a sudden change of mind on their trip.
Charity had the slacks of her pants suit on and was slipping into her blouse. Brett noted she was wearing a peach-colored bra, and that had also amazed him. He hadn’t known his mother had underclothes in any color other than white.
“Ma,” he said urgently.
She turned to him—it seemed almost that she was turning on him. “Did he say something to you?”
“No . . . no. It’s Cujo.”
“Cujo? What about Cujo?”
“He’s sick.”
“What do you mean, sick?”
Brett told her about having his second bowl of Cocoa Bears out on the back steps, about walking into the fog, and how Cujo had suddenly appeared, his eyes red and wild, his muzzle dripping foam.
“And he wasn’t walking right,” Brett finished. “He was kind of, you know, staggering. I think I better tell Daddy.”
“No,” his mother said fiercely, and grasped him by the shoulders hard enough to hurt. “You do no such a thing!”
He looked at her, surprised and frightened. She relaxed her grip a little and spoke more quietly.
“He just scared you, coming out of the fog like that. There’s probably nothing wrong with him at all. Right?”
Brett groped for the right words to make her understand how terrible Cujo had looked, and how for a moment he had thought the dog was going to turn on him. He couldn’t find the words. Maybe he didn’t want to find them.
“If there is something wrong,” Charity continued, “it’s probably just some little thing. He might have gotten a dose of skunk—”
“I didn’t smell any sk—”
“—or he might have been running a woodchuck or a rabbit. Might even have jumped a moose down there in that bog. Or he might have eaten some nettles.”
“I guess he could have,” Brett said doubtfully.
“Your father would just jump on something like that,” she said. “I can hear him now. ‘Sick, is he? Well, he’s your dog, Brett. You see to him. I got too much work to do to be messing around with your mutt.’ ”
Brett nodded unhappily. It was his own thought exactly, magnified by the brooding way his father had been eating breakfast while the sports blared around the kitchen.
“If you just leave him, he’ll come mooching around your dad, and your dad will take care of him,” Charity said. “He loves Cujo almost as much as you do, although he’d never say it. If he sees something’s wrong, he’ll fetch him over to the vet’s in South Paris.”
“Yeah, I guess he would.” His mother’s words rang true to him, but he was still unhappy about it.
She bent and kissed his cheek. “I’ll tell you! We can call your father tonight, if you want. How would that be? And when you talk to him, you just say, sort of casually, ‘You feeding my dog, Daddy?’ And then you’ll know.”
“Yeah,” Brett said. He smiled gratefully at his mother, and she smiled back, relieved, the trouble averted. But, perversely, it had given them something else to worry about during