Anne Colleton gone, Ferdinand Koenig was the only one to whom he would have said even so much.
Koenig answered, 'You never can tell, Sarge. Folks don't think we matter so much now that money doesn't burn a hole in their pockets if they leave it in there more than a minute and a half, but who knows how long that'll last? Who knows what all's liable to go wrong between now and 1925?'
'That's right,' Jake said, smiling for the first time since Jeb Stuart, Jr., had left. 'That's just right. With the Whigs running things, they will go wrong, sure as the sun comes up tomorrow.' He hung up feeling better, but only for a little while. Would anything be left of the Freedom Party when a chance to rule came round at last?
'Mama!' Clara Jacobs screeched from what had been the storeroom. 'Little Armstrong just tore up the picture I was drawing!'' She was almost four, more than twice the age of her little nephew. But Armstrong Grimes, even as a toddler, gave every sign of being hell on wheels. He takes after Edna, Nellie thought. I bet Merle Grimes was a nice man even when he was a little boy. She had such a good opinion of almost no one else in the male half of the human race; the more she got to know her son-in-law, the more he impressed her.
Fortunately, the coffeehouse was almost empty. She could hurry back to the old storeroom and mete out punishment. Armstrong hadn't just torn up Clara's picture; he'd made a snowstorm of pieces out of it. He was happily sticking one of those pieces in his mouth when Nellie yanked it away from him, upended him over her knee, and walloped his backside. 'No, no!' she shouted. 'Mustn't tear up things that don't belong to you!'
Her grandson howled. Since he was wearing a diaper that shielded his bottom, Nellie knew she wasn't hurting him much. The spanking made an impressive amount of noise, though, as did her yelling.
'Now,' she said, 'are you going to do that any more?'
'No,' little Armstrong answered. Nellie wiped his nose, which was dripping yellowish snot. She didn't believe him. For one thing, he was heading toward the age where he said no every other time he opened his mouth. For another, a toddler's promise lasted only till he forgot he'd made it, which meant anywhere from two minutes to, in extraordinary circumstances, an hour or so.
'You be good, you hear me?' Nellie said.
'No,' Armstrong Grimes answered. That was neither defiance nor ignorance, only the first thing that came out of his mouth.
'I'm good, Mama,' Clara said, so virtuously that Nellie expected to be blinded by the halo about to spring into being above her head.
'Of course you are-when you feel like it,' Nellie told her own daughter. 'Pick up those scraps, and don't let him eat any more of them. Don't let him eat your crayons, either.'
'I won't, Mama.' Clara turned to her nephew. 'You see? You can't have anything.' Thus made forcibly aware that he was being deprived, Armstrong started crying again. Nellie had to spend more time soothing him before she could go out front again.
Edna was supposed to come get her son at half past three; she'd left him with Nellie so she could do some unencumbered shopping. She didn't show up till a quarter after four. 'Hello, Ma-I'm sorry,' she said in a perfunctory way. 'How crazy did he drive you?'
'Crazy enough,' Nellie replied. 'I was thinking he reminds me of you.' Edna laughed, but Nellie wasn't joking. She went on, 'Please come get him when you say you will. I've got enough to do keeping up with Clara and the coffeehouse. Put Armstrong in there, too, and I start climbing the walls.'
Edna sniffed. 'I take care of Clara for you sometimes, and you don't hear me complaining about it.'
'Oh, I do sometimes,' Nellie said. 'And besides, when you take care of the children, that's all you do. You have Merle to make a living for you. I've got to make my own living, and this place won't run by itself'
Before Edna could answer, Armstrong picked up something from the floor and started chewing on it. He bit Edna when she stuck her finger in his mouth to get it out. She finally did-it was a nasty little clump of hair and dust-and then whacked him a lot harder than Nellie had done. He wasn't crying now because he was angry or frightened; he was crying because his bottom hurt.
'You've never been fair with me,' Edna said.
And here we go again, Nellie thought. One more round in the fight that never stops for good. She said, 'You think being fair means doing whatever you want. I've got news for you, dearie- it doesn't work that way.'
'I've got news for you, Ma-you never do what I want.' Edna glared. 'You do as you please, and what pleases you most is doing whatever you think will make me maddest.'
'Why, you little liar!' Nellie snapped, as she might have at Clara. But Edna's charge held just enough truth to sting more than it would have had it been made up from whole cloth. 'And you were the one who was always sneaking around behind my back. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.'
'I had to sneak around behind your back. You wouldn't let me live any kind of life in front of your face,' Edna said.
'I don't call living fast and loose any kind of a life.' To forestall her daughter, Nellie added, 'And I ought to know, too. I found out the hard way.'
'Yeah, and you've been frozen up ever since on account of it,' Edna said, another shot with all too much truth in it. 'I got what I was looking for in spite of you, and do you know what else? I like it just fine.' She carried her son out of the coffeehouse, slamming the door behind her hard enough to rattle the windows.
'Why is my big sister angry?' Clara asked from the door to her playroom. 'If I slammed a door like that, I'd get a whipping.'
'Edna's too big to get a whipping.' Under her breath, Nellie mumbled, 'No matter how much she needs one.'
That slammed door also drew Hal from across the street. 'You had another quarrel with Edna,' he said. It was not a question.
'Well, what if I did?' Nellie said. 'I don't suppose I would have, if she'd come and gotten her brat when she was supposed to.'
Exercising her temper proved a mistake. Clara started chanting, 'Armstrong is a brat! Armstrong is a brat!'
'Stop that!' Hal Jacobs said sharply, and, for a wonder, Clara stopped it. She listened to her father more often than to her mother, perhaps because Hal gave her fewer orders than Nellie did.
Nellie sighed. 'I wish Edna would pay as much attention to you as Clara does.' She sighed again. 'I wish anyone would pay attention to me.'
'I always pay attention to you, my dear,' Hal said.
That was true. It was so true, Nellie had come to take it for granted in the years since she and Hal got married. Because she took it for granted, it no longer satisfied her. She said, 'I wish Edna would pay attention to me.'
'She is a grown woman,' Hal said. 'With a little luck, she is paying attention to her own husband now.'
'It's not the same,' Nellie replied in a sulky voice.
'No, I suppose it is not,' Hal admitted. 'But it is good that she should pay attention to someone, I think. And Merle Grimes is a young man worth paying attention to.'
'I know he is. I was thinking the same thing myself earlier today,' Nellie said. 'But he's not her mother, and I am.' She shook her head, discontented with the world and with Edna. 'That's probably why she doesn't pay attention to me.'
'Yes, it probably is,' Hal said. 'When I was becoming a man, I paid as little attention to my mother and my father as I could get away with.'
Nellie had hardly known her own father. When she'd got away from her mother at an early age, it was to go into the demimonde. Hal didn't need to know any more about that than whatever he'd already found out. Nellie said, 'But Edna isn't becoming a woman. By now, she is one, like you said. Shouldn't she have figured out that I know what I'm doing by now?'
'Maybe,' Hal said. 'But maybe not, too.' He looked at Nellie with amused affection. 'She has a stubborn streak as wide as yours. I wonder where she could have gotten it'
'Not from me,' Nellie said automatically. She needed a moment to recognize the expression on her husband's face. Hal Jacobs was doing his best not to laugh out loud. Again, Nellie spoke automatically: 'I'm not stubborn!' Hal let the words hang, the most devastating thing he could have done. Nellie's face went hot. She said, 'I'm not that stubborn, anyway.'
'Well, maybe not,' Hal said; he should have been a diplomat in striped trousers, not a cobbler and sometimes
