The plant - By Stephen King Page 0,60

comfort her. And when Maddy's hand crept into his, he took it the way you take the hand of a frightened child. To comfort her, too. It was them on the bed and me in the doorway and I saw their eyes and knew they were against me. Even Maddy was against me. Especially Maddy, it seems. My schoolyard angel.

"Didn't you see me there, nodding my head because I understood what she wanted? I know I saw you-all nodding the same way. It's now I must be dreaming. Because it can't be that the folks I grew up with down here in this godforsaken map-splat of the world could have turned into graveyard ghouls."

Maddy's face sagged at that and she began to cry. And I was glad I had made her cry. That's how angry I was, how angry I still am when I think of them sitting there in the lamplight. When I think of the tin box with its Sweetheart Girl cover set aside, its insides all turned out. Their hands and laps full of her things. Their eyes full of her things. Their hearts, too. Not her, but her things. Her remainder.

"Oh you self-righteous little prig," Evelyn said. "And weren't you always!"

She stood up and swept her hands back along her cheeks, as if to wipe away her tears... but there were no tears in those flaming eyes of hers. Not this evening. This evening I saw my brother and three sisters with their masks laid aside.

"Save your accusations," I said. I have never liked her - regal Evelyn, whose eyes were so firmly fixed on the prize that she never had time for her littlest brother... or for anyone who did not think the stars pretty much changed their courses to watch Evelyn Walker Hance in her enchanted walk through life. "It's hard to point fingers successfully when your hands are full of stolen goods. You might drop your loot."

"But she's right," Madeline said. "You are self-righteous. You are a prig."

"Maddy, how can you say that?" I asked. The others could not have hurt me, I don't think, at least not one by one; only she.

"Because it's true." She let go of Floyd's hand, stood up, and faced me. I don't believe I will ever forget a single word of what she said. More memorating, God help me.

"You were here for the wake, you were here for the reading of a dead-letter her own son wasn't good enough to write, you were here for the burying, you were here for the after-burying, and you're here now, looking at things you don't understand and passing a fool's judgement on them because of all the things you don't know. Things that went on while you were up in New York, chasing the Pulitzer Prize with a broom in your hand. Up in New York, playing the nigger and telling yourself whatever different it takes for you to get to sleep at night."

"Amen! Tell it!" Sophie said. Her eyes were blazing, too. They were a demon's eyes, almost. And I? I was silent. Stunned to silence. Filled with that horrible, deathlike emotion that comes when someone finally spills out the home truths. When you finally understand that the person you see in the mirror is not the one others see.

"Where were you when she died, though? Where were you when she had the six or seven little heart attacks leading up to the big ones? Where were you when she had all those little strokes and got so funny in her head?"

"Oh, he was in New York," Floyd said cheerily. "He was employing his fine arts degree scrubbing floors in some white man's book-publishing office."

"It's research," I said in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I felt all at once as though I might faint. "Research for the book."

"Research, that explains it," Evelyn said with a sage nod, and put the cash money carefully back into the tin box. "That's why she went without lunches for four years in order to pay for your schoolbooks. So you could research the wonderful world of custodial science."

"Oh, ain't you a bitch," I said... just as though I had not written many of those same things about my job at Zenith House, not once but several times, in the pages of this journal.

"Shut up," Maddy said. "Just shut up and listen to me, you self-righteous, judgmental prig." She spoke in a low, furious voice that I had never heard