Her fingers were still twisted, still crooked, and the joints were still bunched, but the acute swelling which had been there Friday night was almost completely gone.
“Come on, lady. Give.”
“I’m not sure I want to tell you,” she said. “I’m a little embarrassed, actually.”
They stopped and waved at Rosalie as she drove by in her old blue Toyota.
“Come on,” Alan said. “’Fess up.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess it was just a matter of finally meeting the right doctor.” Slow color was rising in her cheeks.
“Who’s that?”
“Dr. Gaunt,” she said with a nervous little laugh. “Dr. Leland Gaunt.”
“Gaunt!” He looked at her in surprise. “What does he have to do with your hands?”
“Drive me down to his shop and I’ll tell you on the way.”
4
Five minutes later (one of the nicest things about living in Castle Rock, Alan sometimes thought, was that almost everything was only five minutes away), he swung into one of the slant spaces in front of Needful Things. There was a sign in the window, one Alan had seen before:
TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
It suddenly occurred to Alan-who hadn’t thought about this aspect of the new store at all until now-that closed except “by appointment” was one fuck of a strange way to run a small-town business.
“Alan?” Polly asked hesitantly. “You look mad.”
“I’m not mad,” he said. “What in the world do I have to be mad about? The truth is, I don’t know how I feel. I guess-” He uttered a short laugh, shook his head, and started again. “I guess I’m what Todd used to call ’gabberflasted.’ Quack remedies? It just doesn’t seem like you, Polly.”
Her lips tightened at once, and there was a warning in her eyes when she turned to look at him. “’Quack’ isn’t the word I’d have used.
Quack is for ducks and… and prayer-wheels from the ads in the back of Inside View. ’Quack’ is the wrong word to use if a thing works, Alan. Do you think I’m wrong?”
He opened his mouth-to say what, he wasn’t sure-but she went on before he could say anything.
“Look at this.” She held her hands out in the sunshine flooding through the windshield, then opened them and closed them effortlessly several times.
“All right. Poor choice of words. What I-”
“Yes, I’d say so. A very poor choice.”
“I’m sorry.”
She turned all the way around to face him then, sitting where Annie had so often sat, sitting in what had once been the Pangborn family car. Why haven’t I traded this thing yet? Alan wondered.
What am I-crazy?
Polly placed her hands gently over Alan’s. “Oh, this is starting to feel really uncomfortable-we never argue, and I’m not going to start now. I buried a good companion today. I’m not going to have a fight with my boyfriend, as well.”
A slow grin lit his face. “That what I am? Your boyfriend?”
“Well… you’re my friend. Can I at least say that?”
He hugged her, a little astonished at how close they had come to having harsh words. And not because she felt worse; because she felt better. “Honey, you can say anything you want. I love you a bunch.”
“And we’re not going to fight, no matter what.”
He nodded solemnly. “No matter what.”
“Because I love you, too, Alan.”
He kissed her cheek, then let her go. “Let me see this ashcan thing he gave you.”
“It’s not an ashcan, it’s an azka- And he didn’t give it to me, he loaned it to me on a trial basis. That’s why I’m here-to buy it. I told you that. I just hope he doesn’t want the moon and stars for it.”
Alan looked at the sign in the display window, and at the shade pulled down over the door. He thought, I’m afraid that’s just what he is going to want, darlin.
He didn’t like any of this. He had found it hard to take his eyes away from Polly’s hands during the funeral service he had watched her manipulate the catch on her purse effortlessly, dip into her bag for a Kleenex, then close the catch with the tips of her fingers instead of shuffling the bag awkwardly around so she could do it with her thumbs, which were usually a good deal less painful. He knew her hands were better, but this story about a magic charmand that was what it came down to when you scraped the frosting off the cake-made him extremely nervous. It reeked of confidence game.
TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
No-except for a few fancy restaurants like Maurice, he hadn’t seen a business that kept appointment-only hours since he’d come to Maine.
And you could walk right off the street and get a table at Maurice nine times out of ten… except in the summer, of course, when the tourists were spawning.
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
Nevertheless, he had seen (out of the corner of his eye, as it were) people going in and out all week long. Not in droves, maybe, but it was clear that Mr. Gaunt’s way of doing business hadn’t hurt him any, odd or not. Sometimes his customers came in little groups, but far more often they seemed to be on their own… or so it seemed to Alan now, casting his mind back over the previous week.
And wasn’t that how con-men worked? They split you off from the herd, got you on your own, made you comfortable, and then showed you how you could own the Lincoln Tunnel for this one-time-only low price.
“Alan?” Her fist knocked lightly on his forehead. “Alan, are you in there?”
He looked back at her with a smile. “I’m here, Polly.”
She had worn a dark-blue jumper with a matching blue stock tie to Nettle’s funeral. While Alan was thinking, she had taken off the tie and dextrously unbuttoned the top two buttons of the white blouse underneath.
“More!” he said with a leer. “Cleavage! We want cleavage!”
“Stop,” she said primly but with a smile. “We’re sitting in the middle of Main Street and it’s two-thirty in the afternoon. Besides, we ve just come from a funeral, in case you forgot.”
He started. “Is it really that late?”
“If two-thirty’s late, it’s late.” She tapped his wrist. “Do you ever look at the thing you’ve got strapped on there?”
He looked at it now and saw it was closer to two-forty than twothirty. Middle School broke at three o’clock. If he was going to be there when Brian Rusk got out, he had to get moving right away.
“Let me see your trinket,” he said.
She grasped the fine silver chain around her neck and pulled out the small silver object on the end of it. She cupped it in her palm… then closed her hand over it when he moved to touch it.
“Uh… I don’t know if you’re supposed to.” She was smiling, but the move he’d made had clearly left her uncomfortable. “It might screw up the vibrations, or something.”
“Oh, come on, Polly,” he said, annoyed.
“Look,” she said, “let’s get something straight, okay? Want to?”
The anger was back in her voice. She was trying to control it, but it was there. “It’s easy for you to make light of this. You’re not the one with the oversized buttons on the telephone, or the oversized Percodan prescription.”
“Hey, Polly! That’s-”
“No, never mind hey Polly.” Bright spots of color had mounted in her cheeks. Part of her anger, she would think later, sprang from a very simple source: on Sunday, she had felt exactly as Alan felt now. Something had happened since then to change her mind, and dealing with that change was not easy. “This thing works. I know it’s crazy, but it does work. On Sunday morning, when Nettle came over, I was in agony. I’d started thinking about how the real solution to all my problems might be a double amputation. The pain was so bad, Alan, that I turned that thought over with a feeling that was almost surprise. Like’Oh yeah-amputation! Why haven’t I thought of that before? It’s so obvious!’ Now, just two days later, all I’ve got is what Dr. Van Allen calls ’fugitive pain,’ and even that seems to be going away. I remember about a year ago I spent a week on a brown-rice diet because that was supposed to help. Is this so different?”
The arger had gone out of her voice as she spoke, and now she was looking at him almost pleadingly.
“I don’t know, Polly. I really don’t.”
She had opened her hand again, and she now held the azka between her thumb and forefinger. Alan bent close to look at ’ it, but made no move to touch it this time. It was a small silver object, not quite round. Tiny holes, not much bigger than the black dots which make up newsprint photographs, studded its lower half. It gleamed mellowly in the sunlight.
And as Alan looked at it, a powerful, irrational feeling swept him: he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. He resisted a brief, powerful urge to simply rip it off Polly’s neck and throw it out the open window.
Yes! Good idea, sport! You do that and you’ll be picking your teeth out of your lap!
“Sometimes it almost feels like something is moving around inside of it,” Polly said, smiling. “Like a Mexican jumping bean, or something. Isn’t that
