The Bachman Books

invitation to Christmas dinner and not to some new year's divorce court had been the thing on her lips inside. God! He almost sprayed laughter.

'I'm going to eat at home.'

'You can come here,' she said. 'It would be just the two of us.'

'No,' he said, thoughtfully and then more firmly: 'No. Emotions have a way of getting out of hand during the holidays. Another time.'

She was nodding, also thoughtfully.

'Will you be eating alone?' he asked.

'I can go to Bob and Janet's. Really, are you sure?'

'Yes.'

'Well . . . ' But she looked relieved.

They walked to the door and shared a bloodless kiss.

'I'll call you,' he said.

'You better. '

'And give my best to Bobby.'

'I will. '

He was halfway down the walk to the car when she called: 'Bart! Bart, wait a minute!'

He turned almost fearfully.

'I almost forgot,' she said. 'Wally Hammer called and invited us to his New Year's party. I accepted for both of us. But if you don't want to-'

'Wally?' He frowned. Walter Hammer was about their only crosstown friend. He worked for a local ad agency. 'Doesn't he know we're, you know, separated?'

'He knows, but you know Walt. Things like that don't faze him much.'

Indeed they didn't. Just thinking about Walter made him smile. Walter, always threatening to quit advertising in favor of advanced truss design. Composer of obscene limericks and even more obscene parodies of popular tunes. Divorced twice and tagged hard both times. Now impotent, if you believed gossip, and in this case he thought the gossip was probably true. How long had it been since he had seen Walt? Four months? Six? Too long.

'That might be fun,' he said, and then a thought stuck him.

She scanned it from his face in her old way and said, 'There won't be any laundry people there.'

'He and Steve Ordner know each other.'

'Well, yes, him-' She shrugged to show how unlikely she thought it was that him would be there, and the shrug turned into an elbow-holding little shiver. It was only about twenty-five degrees.

'Hey, go on in,' he said. 'You'll freeze, dummy.'

'Do you want to go?'

'I don't know. I'll have to think about it. ' He kissed her again, this time a little more firmly, and she kissed back. At a moment like this, he could regret everything-but the regret was far away, clinical.

'Merry Christmas, Bart,' she said, and he saw she was crying a little.

'Next year will be better,' he said, the phrase comforting but without any root meaning. 'Go inside before you catch pneumonia. '

She went in and he drove away, still thinking about Wally Hammer's New Year's Eve party. He thought he would go.

December 24, 1973

He found a small garage in Norton that would replace the broken back window for ninety dollars. When he asked the garage man if he would be working the day before Christmas, the garage man said: 'Hell yes, I'll take it any way I can get it.

He stopped on the way at a Norton U-Wash-It and put his clothes in two machines. He automatically rotated the agitators to see what kind of shape the spring drives were in, and then loaded them carefully so each machine would extract (only in the laundromats they called it 'spin-dry') without kicking off on the overload. He paused, smiling a little. You can take the boy out of the laundry, Fred, but you can't take the laundry out of the boy. Right, Fred? Fred? Oh fuck yourself.

'That's a hell of a hole,' the garage man said, peering at the spiderwebbed glass.

'Kid with a snowball,' he said. 'Rock in the middle of it.'

'It was,' he said. 'It really was.'

When the window was replaced he drove back to the U-Wash-It, put his clothes in the dryer, set it to medium- hot, and put thirty cents in the slot. He sat down and picked up someone's discarded newspaper. The U-Wash-It's only other customer was a tired-looking young woman with wire-rimmed glasses and blond streaks in her long, reddish-brown hair. She had a small girl with her, and the small girl was throwing a tantrum.

'I want my bottle!'

'Goddam it, Rachel-'