Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain [30]
"I've heard of things like that happening."
"That would be terrible."
Veda picked up her glass, stuck out her little finger, took a fastidious sip. "Well, Father, I don't really see why you should get so upset about it. It seems to me anybody could see she's right behind the sofa."
"For that, you can go to bed."
Mildred's eyes blazed as she spoke, and Veda got up very quickly. But Bert paid no attention. He draped the belt over his head again, got down on his hands and knees, said "woof-woof," and charged around the sofa with the cutout open. He grabbed the ecstatically squealing Ray in his arms, said it was time they both went to bed, and how would they like Daddy to tuck them in? As he raised the child high in the air, Mildred had to turn her head, for it seemed to her that she loved Bert more than she could love any man, so that her heart was a great stuffing pain.
But when he came back from the tucking in, put the belt on his trousers again, and poured himself another drink, she was thinking sullenly about the car. It didn't occur to her that he was the half-dozenth person she had been furious at that day, and that all of them, in one way or another, were but the faces worn by her own desperate situation. She was a little too literal-minded for such analysis: to her it was a simple matter of justice. She was working, he wasn't. He wasn't entitled to something that would make things so much easier for her, and that he could get along well enough without. He asked her again how she had been, and she said just fine, but all the -time her choler was gaining pressure, and she knew that before -long it would have to come out.
The bell rang, and she answered. But when Wally gave her a friendly pat on the bottom she quickly whispered: "Bert's here." His face froze for a moment, but then he picked up his cue with surprising convincingness. In a voice that would be heard all over the house, he bellowed: "Why, Mildred! Say I haven't seen you in a coon's age! Gee you're looking great! Say, is Bert in?"
"He's right in here."
"I'll only be a minute, but I got to see him."
If Wally elected to believe Bert still lived here, Bert evidently preferred to follow suit. He shook hands with a fine show of hospitality, offered a drink as though the liquor were his own, and asked bow was every little thing quite as though nothing had happened. Wally said be had been trying to- see him for a couple of months now, over something that had come up, and so help him God, this was the first chance he had had. Bert said don't tell him, he simply didn't know what made the time fly. Wally said it was those three houses in Block 14, and what he wanted to know was, had any verbal promise been made at the time of the sale that the corporation would put a retaining wall in the rear? Bert said absolutely not, and launched into details as to how the lots were sold. Wally said it had all sounded pretty funny to him, but he wanted to make sure.
Mildred half listened, no longer in any humor for Wally, her mind on the car, and thinking only how she would begin. But then a perfectly hellish idea entered her mind, and she no sooner thought of it than she acted on it. "My but it's hot in here! Aren't you boys uncomfortable in those coats? Don't you want to take them off?"
"I think she said something, hey, Bert?"
"I'll say she did."
"Don't get up. I'll take them."
They took off their coats, and she draped them over her arm, and stepped into the closet to put them on hangers. When she had them nicely hung up, she slipped her fingers into Bert's change pocket, and there, as she knew it would be, was the key to the car. She took it out, slipped it into her shoe. When she came out of the closet she picked up her drink, which she had barely touched. "I think I'll get tight."
"'Atta girl!"
"Lemme freshen it for you."
Bert