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By Root 304 0

away Mary's floor-bucket and open the garage to air out the stink of gasoline. Make up a story to explain the broken back window if anyone asked about it. And most important, he would try to prepare himself mentally for a visit from the police. As the last resident of Crestallen Street West, it might be perfectly logical for them to at least check him out. And they wouldn't have to sniff up his back trail very far to find out he had been acting erratically. He had screwed up the plant. His wife had left him. A former co-worker had punched him out in a department store. And of course, he had a station wagon, Chevrolet or not. All bad. But none of it proof.

And if they did dig up proof, he supposed he would go to jail. But there were worse things than jail. Jail wasn't the end of the world. They would give him a job, feed him. He wouldn't have to worry about what was going to happen when the insurance money ran out. Sure, there were a lot of things worse than jail. Suicide, for instance. That was worse. He went upstairs and showered.

Later that afternoon he called Mary. Her mother answered and went to get Mary with a sniff. But when Mary herself answered, she sounded nearly gay.

"Hi Bart. Merry Christmas in advance."

"No, Mary Christmas," he responded. It was an old joke that had graduated from humor to tradition.

"Sure," she said. "What is it, Bart?"

"Well, I've got a few presents just little stuff for you and the nieces and nephews. I wondered if we could get together somewhere. I'll give them to you. I didn't wrap the kids' presents-"

"I'd be glad to wrap them. But you shouldn't have. You're not working."

"But I'm working on it," he said.

"Bart, have you have you done anything about what we talked about?"

"The psychiatrist?"

"Yes,"

"I called two. One is booked up until almost June. The other guy is going to be in the Bahamas until the end of March. He said he could take me then."

"What were their names?"

"Names? Gee, honey, I'd have to look them up again to tell you. Adams, I think the first guy was. Nicholas Adams-"

"Bart," she said sadly.

"It might have been Aarons," he said wildly.

"Bart," she said again.

"Okay." he said. "Believe what you want. You will anyway."

"Bart, if you'd only

"What about the presents? I called about the presents, not the goddam shrink. "

She sighed. "Bring them over Friday, why don't you? I can-"

"What, so your mother and father can hire Charles Manson to meet me at the door? Let's just meet on neutral ground, okay?"

"They're not going to be here." she said. "They're going to spend Christmas with Joanna." Joanna was Joanna St. Claire, Jean Galloway's cousin, who lived in Minnesota. They had been close friends in their girlhood (back in that pleasant lull between the War of 1812 and the advent of the Confederacy, he sometimes thought), and Joanna had had a stroke in July. She was still trying to get over it, but Jean had told him and Mary that the doctors said she could go at any time. That must be nice, he thought, having a time bomb built right into your head like that. Hey, bomb, is it today? Please not today. I haven't finished the new Victoria Holt.

"Bart? Are you there?"

"Yes. I was woolgathering. "

"Is one o'clock all right?"

"That's fine."

"Was there anything else?"

"No, huh-uh.

"Well "

"Take good care, Mary."

"I will. Bye, Bart." "Good-bye.

They hung up and he wandered into the kitchen to make himself a drink. The woman he had just talked to on the phone wasn't the same woman that had sat tearfully on the living room couch less than a month ago, pleading for some reason to help explain the tidal wave that had just swept grandly through her ordered life, destroying the work of twenty years and leaving only a few sticks poking out of the mudflats. It was amazing. He shook his head over it the way he would have shaken his head over the news that Jesus had come down from the sky and had taken Richard Nixon up to heaven upon wheels of fire. She has regained herself.

More: She had regained a person he hardly knew at all, a girl-woman he barely remembered.