Cujo

because Vic and Roger had worked their butts off. But that had also meant that she was left with a growingup child and too much time on her hands.

She could count her life's close friends on the fingers of one hand. She was confident that the ones she made would be her friends forever, come bell or high water, but she had never made friends quickly or easily. She had toyed with the idea of getting her Maine certification - Maine and New York were reciprocal; it was mostly a matter of filling out some forms. Then she could go see the Superintendent of Schools and get her name put on the sub list for Castle Rock High. It was a ridiculous notion, and she shelved it after running some figures on her pocket calculator. Gasoline and sitters' fees would eat up most of the twenty-eight bucks a day she might have made.

I've become the fabled Great American Housewife, she had thought dismally one day last winter, watching sleet spick and spack down against the porch storm windows.

Sitting home, feeding Tab his franks and beans and his toasted cheese sandwiches and Campbell's Soup for lunch, getting my slice of life from Lisa on As the World Turns and from Mike on The Young and the Restless. Every now and then we jive it up with a Wheel of fortune session. She could go over and see Joanie Welsh, who had a little girl about Tad's age, but Joanie always made her uneasy. She was three years older than Donna and ten pounds heavier. The extra ten pounds did not seem to bother her. She said her husband liked her that way. Joanie was contented with things as they were in Castle Rock.

A little at a time, the shit had started to back up in the pipe. She started to sharpshoot at Vic about little things, sublimating the big things because they were hard to define and even harder to articulate. Things like loss and fear and getting older. Things like being lonely and then getting terrified of being lonely. Things like hearing a song on the radio that you remembered from high school and bursting into tears for no reason. Feeling jealous of Vic because his fife was a daily struggle to build something, he was a knight-errant with a family crest embossed on his shield, and her life was back here, getting Tad through the day, jollying him when he was cranky, listening to his raps, fixing his meals and snacks. It was a life lived in the trenches. Too much of it was waiting and listening.

And all along she had thought that things would begin to smooth out when Tad was older; the discovery that it wasn't true brought on a kind of low-level horror. This past year he had been out of the house three mornings a week, at jack and Jill Nursery School; this summer it had been five afternoons a week at playcamp. When he was gone the house seemed shockingly empty. Doorways leaned and gaped with no Tad to fill them; the staircase yawned with no Tad halfway up, sitting there in his pajama bottoms before his nap, owlishly looking at one of his picture books.

Doors were mouths, stairways throats. Empty rooms became traps.

So she washed floors that didn't need to be washed. She watched the soaps. She thought about Steve Kemp, with whom she'd had a little flirtation since he had rolled into town the previous fall with Virginia license plates on his van and had set up a small stripping and refinishing business. She had caught herself sitting in front of the TV with no idea what was going on because she had been thinking about the way his deep tan contrasted with his tennis whites, or the way his ass pumped when he moved fast. And finally she had done something. And today She felt her stomach knot up and she ran for the bathroom, her hands plastered to her mouth, her eyes wide and starey. She made it, barely, and tossed up everything. She looked at the mess she had made, and with a groan she did it again.

When her stomach felt better (but her legs were all atremble again, something lost, something gained), she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her face was thrown into hard and unflattering relief by the fluorescent bar. Her skin was too white, her eyes redrimmed. Her hair was plastered to her skull in an unflattering helmet. She saw what she was going to look like when she was old, and the most terrifying thing of all was that right now, if Steve Kemp was here, she thought she would let him make love to her if he would only hold her and kiss her and say that she didn't have to be afraid, that time was a myth and death was a dream, that everything was okay.

A sound came out of her, a screaming sob that could surely not have been born in her chest. It was the sound of a madwoman.

She lowered her head and cried.

Charity Camber sat on the double bed she shared with her husband, Joe, and looked down at something she held in her hands. She had just come back from the store, the same one Donna Trenton patronized. Now her hands and feet and cheeks felt numb and cold, as if she had been out with Joe on the snowmobile for too long. But tomorrow as the first of

July; the snowmobile was put neatly away in the back shed with its tarp, snugged down.

It can't be. There's been some mistake.

But there was no mistake. She had checked half a dozen times, and there was no mistake.

After all, it has to happen to somebody, doesn't it?

Yes, of course. To somebody. But to her?

She could hear Joe pounding on something in his garage, a high, belling sound that beat its way into the hot afternoon like a hammer shaping thin metal. There was a pause, and then, faintly: 'Shit!'

The hammer struck once more and there was a longer pause. Then her husband hollered: 'Brett!'

She always cringed a little when he raised his voice that way and yelled for their boy. Brett loved his father very much, but Charity had never been sure just how Joe felt about his son. That was a dreadful thing to be thinking, but it was true. Once, about two years ago, she had had a horrible nightmare, one she didn't think she would ever forget. She dreamed that her husband drove a pitchfork directly into Brett's chest. The tines went right through him and poked out the back of Brett's T-shirt, holding it out the way tent poles hold a tent up in the air. Little sucker didn't come when I hollered him down, her dream husband said, and she had awakened with a jerk beside her real husband, who had been sleeping the sleep of beer beside her in his boxer shorts. The moonlight had been falling through the window and onto the bed where she now sat, moonlight in a cold and uncaring flood of light, and she had understood just how afraid a person could be, how fear was a monster with yellow teeth, set afoot by an angry God to eat the unwary and the unfit. Joe had used his hands on her a few times in the course of their marriage, and she had learned. She wasn't a genius, maybe, but her mother hadn't raised any fools. Now she did what Joe told her and rarely argued. She guessed Brett was that way too. But she feared for the boy sometimes.

She went to the window in time to see Brett run across the yard and into the barn. Cujo traded at Brett's heels, looking hot and dispirited.

Faintly: 'Hold this for me, Brett.'

More faintly: 'Sure, Daddy.'

The hammering started again, that merciless icepick sound: Whing! Whing! Whing! She imagined Brett holding something against something - a coldchisel against a frozen bearing, maybe, or a square spike against a lockbolt. Her husband a Pall Mall jittering in the comer of his thin mouth, his T-shirt sleeves rolled up, swinging a five-pound pony-hammer. And if he was drunk ... if his aim was a little off .

In her mind she could hear Brett's agonized bowl as the hammer mashed his hand to a red, splintered pulp, and she crossed her arms over her bosom against the vision.

She looked at the thing in her hand again and wondered if there was a way she could use it. More than anything