Household Gods

choice to take it.”

“And our burden when you fall into penury,” Atpomara said, “as you will do if you make any more such choices. What will you do next? Give this tavern to some passerby off the street, and go off to be a wandering philosopher?”

“If I do that,” said Nicole, “I suppose I’ll live off the charity of others. Not you. Believe me, I won’t come to you for one single as.”

“What an ungrateful little chit you are!” said Ila. “Is this how you address your mother?”

She’s not my mother, lady, Nicole wanted to say, but that would have been a very bad idea. She settled for a lift of the chin and a curl of the lip. “I’ll make it on my own. Just you wait and see.”

“But you can’t do that, “ said Brigomarus. “Unless…” A look of wild speculation came over his face. “Don’t tell me. You’re going to marry old Pisspot across the way.” He thumped his fist down on the table, too loud and sudden for Nicole to get a word in edgewise. “That’s it. That is emphatically it. I will not have it. I forbid it!”

“You may go right ahead and forbid it,” Nicole said with rising heat, “and I may go right ahead and do as I see fit. I am not your property, and I am not your child. I will not duck my head and do what you want, simply because it is you who wants it.” She turned on the sisters. “Or you.” And, last and fiercest, on Atpomara: “Or you. I am my own woman. I have my own life here, I make my own living, I decide for myself what I will do and not do. You have no say in it.”

Pacatus and Marcus Flavius Probus exchanged glances. “Poor woman,” said Pacatus.

“Hellebore,” said Marcus Flavius Probus, nodding ponderously.

Pacatus blinked but seemed to get the point, which was more than Nicole could claim. “Oh, yes, she’s off her head — or else she’s up to something with that dyer. What if he encouraged her to free the slave for some purpose of his own? Is he clever enough for that? He’ll have dyed his brains bright blue by now, I should think, with all the fumes from his work.”

Marcus Flavius Probus had no sense of humor, that was evident. He seized on the one thing that must have made sense to him, and worried at it like a dog on a bone. “She can’t marry that person. It’s beneath us all.”

“She is beneath us all,” Ila said.

Nicole stepped in before they could go on. She was quite coldly angry by now, the same anger she’d honed so well in dealing with Frank and his late-model bimbo. “You had better leave,” she said.

No one seemed to hear her. The brothers-in-law and Ila were too busy dissecting her mental state. Tabica was elaborately and tearfully bored. Brigomarus frothed and steamed. Atpomara sat in state, waiting for someone to notice her lofty silence.

Nicole hefted one of the heavy iron skillets near at hand, and let it fall with a ringing crash. That got their attention, one and all. She braced her hands on the bar and leaned across it, glaring at the lot of them. “Did you hear me? I asked you to leave.”

“You can’t do that,” Brigomarus said. It seemed to be a favorite refrain.

“This is my house,” Nicole said, shaping each word with care. “This is my business. This is my life. If you can do nothing better with or for it than play the petty tyrant, then I don’t want or need you. I’ve been getting by on my own so far. I’ll keep right on doing it, too.”

“How can you get by on your own?” Brigomarus demanded. “You’re a woman. You can’t do a single legal thing without my approval.”

“Would you like to bet on it?” Nicole asked him. She thumped a fist on the papyrus that still lay, unregarded, on the bar. “If there’s anything I know about the way the law works, it’s that there’s a way around everything. Sometimes it’s hard, often it’s twisted, but it is there. No law was ever written that didn’t have a loophole somewhere. And I,” she said, “will be sure to find it. “

“My, my,” murmured Ila. “Aren’t we cocky today? What’s got you going, sister dear? Your so-fragrant beloved?”

“I don’t need a man to get going, as you put it,” Nicole shot back, “least of all that one — though he’s worth ten of you. Now get out. I have work to do.”

She thought she’d have to eject them bodily — and wasn’t it ironic that she’d never needed a bouncer in all her time in the tavern, but now, with her putative family, she would dearly have loved to have one. Ila and Brigomarus seemed inclined to camp there till she broke down and let them run all over her.

They’d wait a good long time if so, and she wasn’t lying. She did have work to do. Lots of it. Which she would go ahead and do, starting with cleaning the area behind the bar, till they got fed up and left.

It wasn’t too hard to ignore them. They couldn’t or wouldn’t get at her with the bar between. Their bluster fell on deaf ears. Nobody was inclined to get physical — the one thing she’d been afraid of, because when it came right down to it, a woman was at a major disadvantage against three men.

Nobody came to her rescue, either. Julia was hiding upstairs with the kids. The Calidii Severi were safe in their shop, oblivious to the trouble she was in — and, she had no doubt, to the family’s interpretation of her relationship with Titus Calidius Severus. Her regular morning customers seemed to have conspired to stay away.

Well, and so be it. She’d been alone when Frank deserted her, and she’d handled that just fine. She could deal with a frustrated and clearly dysfunctional family — after all, it wasn’t her family.

As she’d expected, after a while they ran out of things to shout at her and started shouting at one another. When that palled without her taking notice, they gave up at last and left her, as Marcus Flavius Probus said, to her self-inflicted fate. The peace and quiet then were heavenly, and barely disrupted even by the stream of customers that came flooding in. Nicole greeted them with a wide and welcoming smile, and the first few got their orders at half price, just for being there and not being Umma’s relatives. By that time Julia had come out of hiding and gone to work, so quietly Nicole couldn’t find it in herself to ream the woman out with proper ferocity. She settled for a frown and a hard glance, which made Julia flinch rather more than was strictly necessary — slave reflexes, consciously suppressed as she remembered, yet again, that she was free.

Even after the rain stopped, the street in front of the tavern remained a wallow for several days. Lucius thought that was wonderful, and went out and coated himself in mud from head to foot. Nicole had been more affected by the relatives’ visit than she knew at the time; she had no patience left for muddy small boys. The first time he came in black to the eyes and slopping odorous bits on her freshly swept floor, she yelled at him. When that didn’t take the self-satisfied gleam out of his eye, she spanked him. She didn’t feel nearly so guilty about that now as she had the first time. It was, she told herself, like a rolled-up newspaper for a puppy: a nonthreatening but necessary form of discipline.

She poured a bucket of water over him, and then another one, and then felt like giving him another spanking, because that water didn’t flow at the turn of a tap. She or Julia had to lug it from a fountain. Two buckets’ worth of water didn’t make him anything close to clean, either.

It was, fortunately, a men’s day at the baths. In lieu of running Lucius through a car wash, that would have to do. She went next door to see if Sextus Longinius lulus would take him. The thought of sending Lucius out by himself didn’t appeal to her in the least. City upbringing, city paranoia: maybe it wasn’t necessary here, but then again maybe it was.

When she came in and paused to let her eyes adjust to the dimmer light, the tinker was tapping a dented pot back into shape on a form. He smiled at her. She smiled back. But when she explained what she’d come for, he shook his head. “No, Umma, sorry. Not today. I’m backed up for a week as it is.” She could see it, too: heaps and piles of broken or dented utensils, enough to fill the tiny space and spill out into the room behind. He wasn’t insensitive to her disappointment: he said, “I really am sorry. I wish I could, mind, a bath would be nice. But I can’t. Why don’t you try Calidius Severus across the street?”

“I guess I’ll do that,” she said with something less than enthusiasm. It was embarrassing to keep asking favors of the fuller and dyer. Still, she thought, they were friends even if they weren’t lovers — they were that, weren’t they? If a friend wouldn’t do you a favor, then who would?

She picked her way down the muddy sidewalk back to the tavern. Lucius, for a wonder, hadn’t gone anywhere. He was in the public room seeing how many stools he could pile on top of one another, while Julia rather irresponsibly ignored him. Nicole rescued number four just before it toppled onto a customer’s head, snagged Lucius, and dragged him out into the street.