Uh-huh. And all joking aside, try the music. It really works.
Mellows out your brain-waves, or something."
"I will." And the devil of it was, he probably would, as he had already tried Mrs. Rapaport's lemon-and-hot-water recipe, and Shawna McClure's advice on how to clear his mind by slowing his respiration and concentrating on the word cool (except when Shawna said it, the word came out cuhhhh-ooooooooooool). When you were trying to deal with a slow but relentless erosion of your good sleeptime, any folk remedy started to look good.
Ralph began to turn away, then turned back. "What's with that poster next door?"
Ham Davenport wrinkled his nose. "Dan Dalton's place? I don't look in there at all, if I can help it. Screws up my appetite. Has he got something new and disgusting in the window?"
"I guess it's new-it's not as yellow as the rest of them, and there's a notable lack of flydirt on it. Looks like a wanted poster, only it's Susan Day in the photos."
"Susan Day on a-son of a bitch!" He cast a dark and humorless look at the shop next door.
"What is she, President of the National Organization of Women, or something?"
"Ex-President and co-founder of Sisters in Arms. Author of My Mother's Shadow and Lilies of the Valley-that one's a study of battered women and why so many of them refuse to blow the whistle on the men that batter them. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Susie Day's one of the three or four most politically influential women in America right now, and she can really write as well as think. That clown knows I've got one of her petitions sitting right by my cash register."
"What petitions?"
"We're trying to get her up here to speak," Davenport said. "You know the right-to-lifers tried to firebomb WomanCare last Christmas, right?"
Ralph cast his mind cautiously back into the black pit he'd been living in at the end of 1992 and said, "Well, I remember that the cops caught some guy in the hospital's long-term parking lot with a can of gasoline, but I didn't know-"
"That was Charlie Pickering. He's a member of Daily Bread, one of the right-to-life groups that keep the pickets marching out there," Davenport said. "They put him up to it, too-take my word. This year they're not bothering with gasoline, though; they're going to try to get the City Council to change the zoning regulations and squeeze WomanCare right out of existence. They just might do it, too. You know Derry, Ralph-it's not exactly a hotbed of liberalism."
"No," Ralph said with a wan smile. "It's never been that, and WomanCare is an abortion clinic, isn't it?" Davenport gave him an out-of-patience look and jerked his head in the direction of Secondhand Rose. "That's what assholes like him call it," he said, "only they like to use the word mill instead of clinic.
They ignore all the other stuff WomanCare does." To Ralph, Davenport had begun to sound a little like the TV announcer who hawked run-free pantyhose during the Sunday afternoon movie.
"They're involved in family counselling, they deal with spouse and child abuse, and they run a shelter for abused women over by the Newport town line. They have a rape crisis center at the in-town building by the hospital, and a twenty-four-hour hotline for women who've been raped or beaten. In short, they stand for all the things that make Marlboro Men like Dalton shit bullets."
"But they do perform abortions," Ralph said. "That's what the pickets are about, right?"
There had been sign-carrying demonstrators in front of the lowslung, unobtrusive brick building that housed WomanCare for years, it seemed to Ralph. They always looked too pale to him, too intense, too skinny or too fat, too utterly sure that God was on their side, The signs they carried said things like THE UNBORN HAVE RIGHTS, TOO and LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE and that old standby, ABORTION IS MURDER!
On several occasions women using the clinic-which was near Derry Home but not actually associated with it, Ralph thought-had been spat upon.
"Yeah, they perform abortions, Ham said. "You got a problem with that?"
Ralph thought of all the years he and Carolyn had tried to have a baby-years that had produced nothing but several false alarms and a single messy five-months miscarriage-and shrugged. Suddenly the day seemed too hot and his legs too tired. The thought of his return journey-the Up-Mile Hill leg of it in particular-hung in the back of his mind like something strung from a