before it dropped back into the woodbox, and the other three fingers stayed curled, like they were still holdin on. I had to flex my hand three or four times before it started to feel normal again.
After it did, I walked over to Joe and tapped him on the shoulder. 'I want to talk to you,' I says.
'So talk,' he says from behind the paper. 'I ain't stoppin you.'
'I want you lookin at me when I do,' I says. 'Put that rag down.'
He dropped the paper into his lap and looked at me. 'Ain't you got the busiest mouth on you these days,' he says.
'I'll take care of my mouth,' I says, 'you just want to take care of your hands. If you don't, they're gonna get you in more trouble than you could handle in a year of Sundays.'
His brows went up and he asked me what that was supposed to mean.
'It means l want you to leave Selena alone,' I says. He looked like I'd hoicked my knee right up into his family jewels. That was the best of a sorry business, Andy - the look on Joe's face when he found out he was found out. His skin went pale and his mouth dropped open and his whole body kinda jerked in that shitty old rocker of his, the way a person's body will jerk sometimes when they are just fallin off to sleep and have a bad thought on their way down.
He tried to pass it off by actin like he'd had a muscle-twinge in his back, but he didn't fool either one of us. He actually looked a little ashamed of himself, too, but that didn't win him any favor with me. Even a stupid hound-dog has sense enough to look ashamed if you catch it stealin eggs out of a henhouse.
'I don't know what you're talkin about,' he says. 'Then how come you look like the devil just reached into your pants and squeezed your balls?' I asked him.
The thunder started to come onto his brow then. 'If that damned Joe Junior's been tellin lies about me -' he began.
'Joe Junior ain't been sayin yes, no, aye, nor maybe about you,' I says, 'and you can just drop the act, Joe. Selena told me. She told me everything - how she tried to be nice to you after the night I hit you with the cream-pitcher, how you repaid her, and what you said would happen if she ever told.'
'She's a little liar!' he says, throwin his paper on the floor like that proved it. 'A little liar and a god-dam tease! I'm gonna get my belt, and when she shows her face again - if she ever dares to show it around here again -'
He started to get up. I took one hand and shoved him back down again. It's awful easy, shovin a person who's tryin to get out of a rockin chair; it surprised me a little how easy it was. Accourse, I'd almost bashed his head in with a stovelength not three minutes before, and that mighta had somethin to do with it.
His eyes went down to narrow little slits and he said I'd better not fool with him. 'You've done it before,' he says, 'but that don't mean you can bell the cat every time you want to.'
I'd been thinkin that very thing myself, and not so long before, but that wasn't hardly the time to tell him so. 'You can save your big talk for your friends,' I says instead. 'What you want to do right now isn't talk but listen . . . and hear what I say, because I mean every word. If you ever fool with Selena again, I'll see you in State Prison for molesting a child or statutory rape, whichever charge will keep you in cold storage the longest.'
That flummoxed him. His mouth fell open again and he just sat there for a minute, starin up at me.
'You'd never,' he begun, and then stopped. Because he seen that I would. So he went into a pet, with his lower lip poochin out farther than ever. 'You take her part, don't you?' he says. 'You never even ast for my side of it, Dolores.'
'Do you have one?' I asked him back. 'When a man just four years shy of forty asks his fourteen-year-old daughter to take off her underpants so he can see how much hair she has grown on her pussy, can you