Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [129]
“I’m pretty sure I can fix this,” she said.
Spyder didn’t comment, went to the stove and lifted the lid on one of the pots.
“I found a bag of pinto beans in the cabinet, and a can of turnip greens,” Niki said, then began twisting the severed ends of the phone line back together. “Too bad we don’t have stuff to make corn bread.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” and Spyder tasted the pintos, added black pepper to the pot; Niki had already begun covering the spliced wire with electrical tape.
“I think so,” she said. “I mean, it may not be the clearest connection in the world, but I think it’ll at least work again.”
“I wasn’t talking about the phone,” Spyder said. “You have to put salt in these, you know?”
Niki stopped and looked at her.
“And some onion wouldn’t have hurt, either. I thought people from New Orleans knew how to cook beans?”
“Yeah, Spyder. Whenever I wasn’t too busy listening to the blues or chasing alligators down the street, I was cooking beans.”
Spyder opened the refrigerator, began digging around behind six-packs of Buffalo Rock and Diet Coke cans, foil-covered leftovers, for the onion she remembered having seen a day or so before, found a little cardboard carton of mealie worms instead; she took it out and set it on the table. “I thought I threw these out,” and she shook the carton, shsssk-shsssk rattle of sawdust and grubs. “I bet they’re all dead by now, anyway,” and she put them back in the fridge.
“Christ, Spyder. Please don’t put dead worms in the refrigerator.”
“I’ll throw them away later,” trying not to think about what the unused, uneaten mealies really meant, what they’d followed from and signified; she found the onion, white onion almost as big as her fist, hiding behind an old carton of buttermilk.
Niki stood up and dusted off her butt, lifted the receiver and held it against her ear. “Wow,” she said, proud voice. “I did it. I fixed the phone.” Spyder shut the fridge and clapped for her, smiled when Niki curtsied.
The receiver back in its cradle and immediately the black telephone rang. “Jesus,” Niki said. “That’s some good fucking timing, huh?” She started to answer it, but “No,” Spyder said. “No, Niki, don’t.”
“Why? I just fixed it. That’s probably someone that’s been trying to call us for days.”
“I don’t care. Just let it ring.”
Niki stared at the phone, strident box of noise on the wall; Spyder carried her onion over to the sink, ran cold water over the papery skin before she began to peel it. After the eleventh ring, the phone was silent.
“Are you gonna answer it next time?” Niki asked, sounding confused, disappointed, and Spyder shrugged, tossed the empty onion skin at the garbage. “Probably,” she said, opened a drawer next to the sink and rummaged through the jumble of utensils and silverware inside until she found the knife she was looking for.
She sliced the onion on the counter, not bothering to get down the cutting board, not caring if she scratched the wood. So many scratches there already. Most of them there since she’d been a child, and she’d never understood why her mother had always been so careful not to add any more.
“I was just trying to help,” Niki said behind her. “You should’ve said something, if you didn’t want me to fix the phone.”
And then it rang again, third slice through the onion, and Spyder almost cut her hand.
“Do you want me to answer it?” Niki asked.
Spyder finished slicing the onion, three more slices, three more rings, rinsed the knife under the tap. She carried a double handful of onion to the stove and added it to the boiling pot of beans. And then she answered the phone, because she knew it was useless not to, just like she’d known precisely when the bedspread was going to tear, which ball bearing