“Hook your belt,” she said, getting in herself again. “When that needle valve or whatever it is messes up, the car jerks a lot.”
A little apprehensively, Tad buckled his seat belt and harness. He sure hoped they weren’t going to have an accident, like in Ten-Truck Wipe-Out. Even more than that, he hoped Mom wouldn’t cry.
“Flaps down?” she asked, adjusting invisible goggles.
“Flaps down,” he agreed, grinning. It was just a game they played.
“Runway clear?”
“Clear.”
“Then here we go.” She keyed the ignition and backed down the driveway. A moment later they were headed for town.
After about a mile they both relaxed. Up to that point Donna had been sitting bolt upright behind the wheel and Tad had been doing the same in the passenger bucket. But the Pinto ran so smoothly that it might have popped off the assembly line only yesterday.
They went to the Agway Market and Donna bought forty dollars’ worth of groceries, enough to keep them the ten days that Vie would be gone. Tad insisted on a fresh box of Twinkles, and would have added Cocoa Bears if Donna had let him. They got shipments of the Sharp cereals regularly, but they were currently out. It was a busy trip, but she still had time for bitter reflection as she waited in the checkout lane (Tad sat in the cart’s child seat, swinging his legs nonchalantly) on how much three lousy bags of groceries went for these days. It wasn’t just depressing; it was scary. That thought led her to the frightening possibility—probability, her mind whispered—that Vie and Roger might actually lose the Sharp account and, as a result of that, the agency itself. What price groceries then?
She watched a fat woman with a lumpy behind packed into avocado-colored slacks pull a food-stamp booklet out of her purse, saw the checkout girl roll her eyes at the girl running the next register, and felt the sharp rat-teeth of panic gnawing at her belly. It couldn’t come to that, could it? Could it? No, of course not. Of course not. They would go back to New York first, they would—
She didn’t like the way her thoughts were speeding up, and she pushed the whole mess resolutely away before it could grow to avalanche size and bury her in another deep depression. Next time she wouldn’t have to buy coffee, and that would knock three bucks off the bill.
She trundled Tad and the groceries out to the Pinto and put the bags into the hatchback and Tad into the passenger bucket, standing there and listening to make sure the door latched, wanting to close the door herself but understanding it was something he felt he had to do. It was a big-boy thing. She had almost had a heart attack last December when Tad shut his foot in the door. How he had screamed! She had nearly fainted . . . and then Vic had been there, charging out of the house in his bathrobe, splashing out fans of driveway slush with his bare feet. And she had let him take over and be competent, which she hardly ever was in emergencies; she usually just turned to mush. He had checked to make sure the foot wasn’t broken, then had changed quickly and driven them to the emergency room at the Bridgton hospital.
Groceries stowed, likewise Tad, she got behind the wheel and started the Pinto. Now it’ll fuck up, she thought, but the Pinto took them docilely up the street to Mario’s, which purveyed delicious pizza stuffed with enough calories to put a spare tire on a lumberjack. She did a passable job of parallel parking, ending up only eighteen inches or so from the curb, and took Tad in, feeling better than she had all day. Maybe Vie had been wrong; maybe it had been bad gas or dirt in the fuel line and it had finally worked its way out of the car’s system. She hadn’t looked forward to going out to Joe Camber’s Garage. It was too far out in the boonies (what Vic ways referred to with high good humor as East Galoshes Corners—but of course he could afford high good humor, he was a man), and she had been a little scared of Camber the one time she had met him. He was the quintessential backcountry Yankee, grunting instead of talking, sullen-faced. And the dog . . . what was his name? Something that sounded Spanish. Cujo, that was it.