her old Hamilton-Beach blender, and a funny board full of electronic
things which had come from the back of an old radio in the shed. She
thought she would be done long before Joe woke up and came in to
watch the Red Sox on TV at two o'clock.
Actually, it was funny how many ideas she'd had in the last few
days. Some Jesus had told her about; others just seemed to come to
her at odd moments.
Her sewing machine, for instance she'd always wanted one of
those attachments that made the zigzag stitches, but Joe had told her
she would have to wait until he could afford to buy her a new
machine (and that would probably be along about the twelfth of
Never, if she knew Joe). Just four days ago she had seen how, if she
just moved the button stitcher and added a second needle where it had
been at an angle of forty-five degrees to the first needle, she could
make all the zigzags she wanted. All it took was a screwdriver even
a dummy like her could use one of those and it worked just as well
as you could want. She saw that the camshaft would probably warp
out of true before long because of the weight differential, but there
were ways to fix that, too, when it happened.
Then there was the Electrolux. Jesus had told her about that
one. Getting her ready for Joe, maybe. It had been Jesus who told her
how to use Joe's little butane welding torch, and that made it easier.
She had gone over to Derry and bought three of those electronic
Simon games at KayBee Toys. Once she was back home she broke
them open and pulled out the memory boards. Following Jesus'
instructions, she connected the boards and wired Eveready dry cells
to the memory circuits she had created. Jesus told her how to
program the Electrolux and power it (she had in fact, already figured
this out for herself, but she was much too polite to tell Him so). Now
it vacuumed the kitchen, living room, and downstairs bathroom all by
itself. It had a tendency to get caught under the piano bench or in the
bathroom (where it just kept on butting its stupid self against the
toilet until she came running to turn it around), and it scared the
granola out of Ozzie, but it was still an improvement over dragging a
thirty-pound vac around like a dead dog. She had much more time to
catch up on the afternoon stories and now these included true
stories Jesus told her. Her new, improved Electrolux used juice
awfully fast, though, and sometimes it got tangled in its own
electrical cord. She thought she might just scratch the dry cells and
hook up a motorcycle battery to it one day soon. There would be time
after this problem of Joe and The Hussy had been solved.
Or ... just last night. She had lain awake in bed long after Joe
was snoring beside her, thinking about numbers. It occurred to
'Becka (who had never gotton beyond Business Math in high school)
that if you gave numbers letter values, you could un-freeze them
you could turn them into something that was like Jell-O. When they
the numbers were letters, you could pour them into any old mold
you liked. Then you could turn the letters back into numbers, and
that was like putting the Jell-O into the fridge so it would set, and
keep the shape of the mold when you turned it out onto a plate later
