the bag that had fallen over. It had been a ketchup bottle that had shattered. You’d figure it, wouldn’t you? Half a bottle of Heinz had puddled out on the powder-blue pile carpeting of the hatchback. It looked as if someone had committed hara-kiri back there. She supposed she could sop up the worst of it with a sponge, but the stain would still show. Even if she used a rug shampoo she was afraid it would show.
She tugged the wagon up to the kitchen door at the side of the house while Tad pushed. She lugged the groceries in and was debating whether to put them away or clean up the ketchup before it could set when the phone rang. Tad was off for it like a sprinter at the sound of a gun. He had gotten very good at answering the phone.
“Yes, who is it, please?”
He listened, grinned, then held out the phone to her.
Figures, she thought. Someone who’ll want to talk for two hours about nothing. To Tad she said, “Do you know who it is, hon?”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s Dad.”
Her heart began to beat more rapidly. She took the phone from Tad and said, “Hello? Vic?”
“Hi, Donna.” It was his voice all right, but so reserved . . . so careful. It gave her a deep sinking feeling that she didn’t need on top of everything else.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I just thought you’d call later. If at all.”
“Well, we went right over to Image-Eye. They did all the Sharp Cereal Professor spots, and what do you think? They can’t find the frigging kinescopes. Roger’s ripping his hair out by the roots.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “He hates to be off schedule, doesn’t he?”
“That’s an understatement.” He sighed deeply. “So I just thought, while they were looking . . . ”
He trailed off vaguely, and her feelings of desperation—her feelings of sinking—feelings that were so unpleasant and yet so childishly passive, turned to a more active sense of fear. Vie never trailed off like that, not even if he was being distracted by stuff going on at his end of the wire. She thought of the way he had looked on Thursday night, so ragged and close to the edge.
“Vic, are you all right?” She could hear the alarm in her voice and knew he must hear it too; even Tad looked up from the coloring book with which he had sprawled out on the hall floor, his eyes bright, a tight little frown on his small forehead.
“Yeah,” he said. “I just started to say that I thought I’d call now, while they’re rummaging around. Won’t have a chance later tonight, I guess. How’s Tad?”
“Tad’s fine.”
She smiled at Tad and then tipped him a wink. Tad smiled back, the lines on his forehead smoothed out, and he went back to his coloring. He sounds tired and I’m not going to lay all that shit about the car on him, she thought, and then found herself going right ahead and doing it anyway.
She heard the familiar whine of self-pity creeping into her voice and struggled to keep it out. Why was she even telling him all of this, for heaven’s sake? He sounded like he was falling apart, and she was prattling on about her Pinto’s carburetor and a spilled bottle of ketchup.
“Yeah, it sounds like that needle valve, okay,” Vie said. He actually sounded a little better now. A little less down. Maybe because it was a problem which mattered so little in the greater perspective of things which they had now been forced to deal with. “Couldn’t Joe Camber get you in today?”
“I tried him but he wasn’t home.”
“He probably was, though,” Vie said. “There’s no phone in his garage. Usually his wife or his kid runs his messages out to him. Probably they were out someplace.”
“Well, he still might be gone—”
“Sure,” Vic said. “But I really doubt it, babe. If a human being could actually put down roots, Joe Camber’s the guy that would do it.”
“Should I just take a chance and drive out there?” Donna asked doubtfully. She was thinking of the empty miles along 117 and the Maple Sugar Road . . . and all that was before you got to Camber’s road, which was so far out it didn’t even have a name. And if that needle valve chose a stretch of that desolation in which to pack up for good, it would just make another hassle.