McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [99]
“I think Janna’s going to be ready to go home before too long,” he said, but before Suze’s heart could begin to sing, added, “We need to think about her care. She tells me you have glaucoma.”
“It’s under control,” she said quickly, not a complete lie.
“Who’s your doctor?” Suze told him, and his form shifted in a way she knew meant a nod. “A good man. But you can’t drive. And caring for Janna is going to require a lot of effort in the early days. Can you ask that girl to move in full-time, maybe for the first month?”
Suze very nearly stood up and walked out. She’d stuck by Janna all these weeks, stretching the bonds between them far beyond the flimsy beginnings. She wanted to tell this man, “Look, I barely know Janna—I only met her in January, moved here on a whim. Really, it’s time I moved on.” Nearly told him, “If I have to live with that hymn-spouting child, I’ll go nuts.” Almost decided that she’d done her part as a faithful friend, and that now she’d seen Janna back on her feet, it was best to clear the way to putting two lives back on track.
But she did not. She’d seen the beginnings of something real with Janna, felt the rare touch of a person who understood the forces that drove her. Janna had never once told Suze that she shouldn’t do something because of her sight, had even egged her on; who was Suze to tell Janna goodbye?
“Her insurance won’t cover a full-time nurse?” Suze asked, not expecting much. She was answered by the rustle and shift of a shaking head.
“Afraid not.”
“Then I guess we’ll have to try Courtney.”
The child was overjoyed. They had ten days before Janna would be released, and Courtney spent it in a whirlwind of busybody virtue, overseeing Andy’s building of a wheelchair ramp (which Suze insisted be made temporary), rearranging furniture (each shift accompanied by multiple reminders to Suze to take care not to trip over the sofa, the table, the rug), fretting about throw rugs and wheelchair access and the cabin’s apparently inadequate water supply (which had been fine until the child had decided to launder every bit of bedding in the house on Monday morning). Spare furniture was stored in the shed, a bed was brought in for the girl, and Suze’s loom shoved as far into the corner as it would go. Suze knew damn well that they’d be hard put to get rid of Courtney when school started up next month, even if Janna was up and dancing.
Janna was set to come home on the twenty-fourth of July, a Wednesday. With two days to go, the water tank again ran dry, and Courtney spilled over in shrill cries of distress and disaster. The rest of the day was taken up with Andy. He looked at the small tank behind the house, then at the big one near the road, and scratched under his baseball cap in puzzlement.
“This here pressure pump’s working fine now,” he told Suze, who had driven down with him, more to escape the flurry of last-minute housecleaning than because she thought she could do any good.
“Some kind of intermittent fault?”
“Can’t see any. Sometime you get bugs on the contacts, breaks the flow of electricity. I’ve cleaned ’em off, gave ’em a shot of Raid— we’ll see if that does it. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably want to get the water people in, pull the well pump itself and see if it’s packing up.”
“How many gallons did you say this tank holds?”
“You got a five thousand–gallon tank here, five hundred near the house. That’s a hundred loads of laundry, or a couple days of leaving the hose running. Shouldn’t happen.”
Suze looked at the green plastic monolith of the tank, her mind’s eye clearly seeing that length of PVC pipe cutting into the main supply line. She teetered on the edge of telling the old builder about it, of ratting out on her Thoreau. But Courtney would have a thousand fits, and Andy would take manly command, and Suze’s preferences would be trampled underfoot. So she’d think about it, before she said anything to Andy.
Tuesday, Courtney