For a moment she felt a totally insane urge to tear the sweat-stained, creased sheet of yellow legal paper to bits and toss them out her window, so much fluttering confetti. Then she handed the paper back to Tad and ran both hands through his hair, ashamed and scared. What was happening to her, for Christ’s sake? A sadistic thought like that. Why would she want to make it worse for him? Was it Vic? Herself? What?
It was so hot—too hot to think. Sweat was streaming down her face and she could see it trickling down Tad’s cheeks as well. His hair was plastered against his skull in unlovely chunks, and it looked two shades darker than its usual medium-blond. He needs his hair washed, she thought randomly, and that made her think of the bottle of Johnson’s No More Tears again, sitting safely and sanely on the bathroom shelf, waiting for someone to take it down and pour a capful or two into one cupped palm.
(don’t lose control of yourself)
No, of course not. She had no reason to lose control of herself. Everything was going to be all right, wasn’t it? Of course it was. The dog wasn’t even in sight, hadn’t been for more than an hour. And the mailman. It was almost ten o’clock now. The mailman would be along soon, and then it wouldn’t matter that it was so hot in the car. “The greenhouse effect,” they called it. She had seen that on an SPCA handout somewhere, explaining why you shouldn’t shut your dog up in your car for any length of time when it was hot like this. The greenhouse effect. The pamphlet had said that the temperature in a car that was parked in the sun could go as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit if the windows were rolled up, so it was cruel and dangerous to lock up a pet while you did your shopping or went to see a movie. Donna uttered a short, cracked-sounding chuckle. The shoe certainly was on the other foot here, wasn’t it? It was the dog that had the people locked up.
Well, the mailman was coming. The mailman was coming and that would end it. It wouldn’t matter that they had only a quarter of a Thermos of milk left, or that early this morning she had to go to the bathroom and she had used Tad’s small Thermos—or had tried to—and it had overflowed and now the Pinto smelled of urine, an unpleasant smell that only seemed to grow stronger with the heat. She had capped the Thermos and thrown it out the window. She had heard it shatter as it hit the gravel. Then she had cried.
But none of it mattered. It was humiliating and demeaning to have to try and pee into a Thermos bottle, sure it was, but it didn’t matter because the mailman was coming—even now he would be loading his small blue-and-white truck at the ivy-covered brick post office on Carbine Street . . . or maybe he had already begun his route, working his way out Route 117 toward the Maple Sugar Road. Soon it would end. She would take Tad home, and they would go upstairs. They would strip and shower together, but before she got into the tub with him and under the shower, she would take that bottle of shampoo from the shelf and put the cap neatly on the edge of the sink, and she would wash first Tad’s hair and then her own.
Tad was reading the yellow paper again, his lips moving soundlessly. Not real reading, not the way he would be reading in a couple of years (if we get out of this, her traitorous mind insisted on adding senselessly but instantly), but the kind that came from rote memorization. The way driving schools prepared functional illiterates for the written part of the driver’s exam. She had read that somewhere too, or maybe seen it on a TV news story, and wasn’t it amazing, the amount of crud the human mind was capable of storing up? And wasn’t it amazing how easily it all came spewing out when there was nothing else to engage it? Like a subconscious garbage disposal running in reverse.
That made her think of something that had happened in her parents’ house, back when it had still been her house too. Less than two hours before one of her mother’s Famous Cocktail Parties (that was how Donna’s father always referred