hunch of his. But then Darlene went away to college and that was that. Lenny slid back down into his old loser self. It was like she had given him a vision of another way to live, another kind of person to be, and then, just when he was starting to believe it might be possible—she left.
Bitch.
Alvie rattled the bag. He had a few more pieces to go. After he had gotten out the last one, he intended to reach over the table with two hands and crunch the bag in Harm’s face, hard and long. Really make that fucker squirm.
Somebody else had come into the lounge.
It was an aide, one of those fat old ladies in their pink smocks and their too-tight white pants and ugly white shoes. Alvie smiled and held up the bag. “Gonna play checkers,” he said. “Harm here loves his checkers.”
The aide had come in to retrieve a cane propped up in a corner of the lounge. One of the residents had left it there. She picked up the cane, and then she looked over at Alvie, and then down at Harm, who sat in the chair with his arms around his shoulders. He was shuddering.
“Doesn’t seem to me like he likes it too much,” she said dubiously.
Alvie laughed. “Old Harm here don’t know what he likes anymore. He’ll come around. You watch.” He was silently willing her to leave, but he knew that if he showed that, if he revealed how much he wanted to see the last of her fat ass, she would probably stick around. People were perverse like that. Did what they could to go against you, every damned chance they got.
He looked closer at the woman. She was standing a little cockeyed. She had a problem with one of her hips. Her named tag said MARCY.
She’s the one, Alvie thought. When the time comes—and it’s coming, oh, yes, it’s coming—she’s the one I’ll tell Lenny to pick.
He remembered seeing her not just here at the Terrace, but in town one day. In Norbitt. He had recognized her then, even though she wasn’t wearing that damned pink smock. The bad hip gave her away. She had been trying to feed coins into a meter and she dropped a couple, probably a nickel and a penny, could not have been much more than that, and when she tried to lean over to fetch them, her hip must have seized up on her, because she jerked and stood up straight again, her free hand going to her hip. She rubbed at it, and then she tried once more. Again, the hip misbehaved. It was only on the third try that she was able to pick up the coins from the sidewalk.
Anybody who works that hard for a nickel and a penny is poor, Alvie remembered thinking. Really poor. As poor as his family had been when Alvie was a kid, after the church fired his dad because the Reverend Leonard Sherrill, Mr. Morality, Mr. I’m Better Than You Are, couldn’t keep it in his pants.
Anybody that poor would be an easy target.
“Just the same, sir,” Marcy was saying. “Why don’t you put the bag down and see if it calms him?”
“Sure.” Alvie set the bag on the floor. He took the seat across from Harm. He spread out his arms, as if he was blessing the checkerboard, the table, his old buddy. “We’re just fine, ma’am. Appreciate the concern for good old Harm. You have yourself a nice day now, you hear?”
Marcy stood there for a few more seconds, fingering the cane she had just retrieved, eyes on the checkerboard. She did not want to seem as if she was staring at the visitor, keeping tabs. But she needed to make sure things were really okay here. Tammy, the housekeeper, would be coming in momentarily to dust the blinds; if not for that, Marcy would not have left. She did not like this old man. He came here frequently, to sit with Mr. Strayer, and each time he did, she liked him less. There was a slipperiness to him. A sliminess. She could not define it past that.
“You, too,” she said, because that was what you were supposed to say when someone told you to have a nice day. One of the other aides had told her that he was a preacher. Seemed unlikely, but okay.
When she moved her eyes back in his direction, he was looking at her, too, just as intently.