was the thing to do; that was the ticket. Never mind the eyebrow
pencil, just forget that she had none of the signs of brain injury she
had seen on the afternoon stories and Marcus Welby, M.D., that was
the important thing. She was all right. As for the eyebrow pencil, she
would just forget that part.
And so she had, at least until now. She looked at her half-eaten
dinner and realized with a sort of dull humor that she had been wrong
about her appetite she couldn't eat another bite.
She took her plate over to the garbage and scrapped what was
left into the can, while Ozzie wound restlessly around her ankles. Joe
didn't look up from his magazine. In his mind, Nancy Voss was
asking him again if that tongue of his was as long as it looked.
She woke up in the middle of the night from some confusing dream in
which all the clocks in the house had been talking in her father's
voice. Joe lay beside her, flat on his back in his boxer shorts, snoring.
Her hand went to the Band-Aid. The hole didn't hurt, didn't
exactly throb, but it itched. She rubbed at it gently, afraid of another
of those dazzling green flashes. None came.
She rolled over on her side and though: You got to go to the
doctor, 'Becka. You got to get that seen to. I don't know what you
did, but
No, she answered herself. No doctor. She rolled to her other
side, thinking she would be awake for hours now, wondering, asking
herself frightened questions. Instead, she was asleep again in
moments.
In the morning the hole under the Band-Aid hardly itched at all,
and that made it easier not to think about. She made Joe his breakfast
and saw him off to work. She finished washing the dishes and took
out the garbage. They kept it in a little shed beside the house that Joe
had built, a structure not much bigger than a doghouse. You had to
lock it up or the coons came out of the woods and made a mess.
She stepped in, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and put the
green bag down with the others. Vinnie would be by in Friday or
Saturday and then she would give the shed a good airing. As she was
backing out, she saw a bag that hadn't been tied up like the others. A
curved handle, like the handle of a cane protruded from the top.
Curious, she pulled it out and saw it was an umbrella. A
number of moth-eaten, unraveling hats came out with the umbrella.
A dull warning sound in her head. For a moment she could
almost see through the inkstain to what was behind it, to what had
happened to her
(bottom it's in the bottom something heavy something in a box
what Joe don't remember won't)
yesterday. But did she want to know?
No.
She didn't.
She wanted to forget.
She backed out of the little shed and rebolted the door with
hands that trembled the slightest bit.
A week later (she still changed the band-Aid each morning, but
