let her stay here, just give her one of the bedrooms. Because we’ve got her to come out of her own room finally but she’s still shaky. And there’s nowhere else she’ll willingly go.”
Casey leaned forward suddenly and clasped both of her hands.
“Please,” she said. “Please?”
Susan was gazing at her, confused and slightly panicked, when there was a knock behind them and the jackhammer guy clomped in from the back, covered in dust and leaving white bootprints all over the ancient rug.
“You got a manhole in your backyard,” he said.
“A manhole?”
“Problem is, the cement was poured right onto the plug, you know, the metal lid on the hole. I got most of it off but you still got that metal plug there, and the thing’s not moving. Possibly rusted over, maybe locked from the inside, hell if I know. If you want to open the lid you’re gonna need to bring in something like a backhoe and dig up the whole deal. Or blow it up. Hell. The drill won’t do any more for you than it’s already done.”
“Oh. Well. Thanks, though,” said Susan, disappointed.
“Is it like a city manhole?” asked Casey. “It should have that stuff written right on it, right? Like initials or something? Seems to me the city would need to deal with it, not us. What if there’s some high-voltage line or shit like that under there? Or toxic raw sewage?”
“No letters I could see,” said the jackhammer guy.
“I’ll call the city anyway,” said Susan. “OK. So. Thank you.”
“I still gotta load up the truck. I’ll come back in when I’m done. Be a hundred fifty,” said the guy. “Cash or check.”
When he was gone they were back in their awkward pause—Casey’s request hanging between them. Susan flashed back to their last such pause, or the last one she had noticed, in the minutes before they found out Hal was dead. They had been standing in the airport beside the baggage-claim thing, the particular luggage conveyor belt always shaped, come to think of it, like a bell curve. There’d been a poster of a high-rise on the wall, in Rio de Janeiro or Buenos Aires or some other far-south city where there were beaches littered with half-naked women in thong bikinis and the apartment buildings were white. Now when she thought of the phone sex, of Casey and phone sex and her maternal anxiety, she would always think of tall white buildings. There was nothing she could do about it; the association was simply lodged in her mind. Neurons firing the same way repeatedly, carving out a deep rut—it was what happened, they said, with clinical depression. In a rut could be literal, could happen to neural pathways in your brain.
It struck her that she felt free to ask, finally.
“You’re not doing that phone-sex job still, are you? Now that you’re, you know, married and all that?”
“Nah,” said Casey. “It was a momentary thing. Fun while it lasted.”
“So I know this sounds like a mother and all that. But what can I say, I am one. Have you been thinking about what you want to do career-wise? I don’t see you living off T.’s money. I don’t see you just, you know, indefinitely flying around the world with him, handing out Evian at whale strandings.”
“No,” said Casey. “No. Not indefinitely.”
“So?”
“Well, shit. I’d like to have an answer for you. I’d like to for myself. But the truth is, I don’t know yet. So I’m going to give it some time. I’m going to have this honeymoon period. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. I’m free-floating. Say for a year. And then I’ll decide.”
“I see,” said Susan, nodding.
“What the hell is that,” said Casey, and gestured. “An armadillo or something?”
“A nine-banded armadillo,” said Susan, surprised. “Of course. What did you think?”
“It’s weird-looking,” said Casey. “It’s basically a freak.”
“I really wouldn’t say that,” said Susan.
She felt annoyed.
“It’s like a giant pill bug with a rat head and a long, ratty tail,” went on Casey. “You know, those bugs that roll up into a ball? Or doodlebugs, some of the kids used to call them. It’s like one of those, but bigger and uglier.”
“If you’re trying to get me to do you a favor, you shouldn’t insult the collection,” said Susan testily.
“Wow,” said Casey. “You really like the thing.”
“It’s not a question of liking,” said Susan, but she felt increasingly agitated. “And it’s not a thing. Or it wasn’t. Anyway. I’m going to the kitchen. You can come with