The Merchant of Menace

“No, nothing that good. I just offered that little Pet Dwyer a ride and she turned me down because she can't accept rides. She's such a weird little girl. I've got to hide Todd's presents before he gets here.”

Jane disappeared into the basement for a moment and when she returned, Shelley asked, 'Pet Dwyer?'

“Patricia, really. You know her, Shelley. Lives across the street and two or three houses down? The blue house with the white trim. She comes over at least three times a week to visit Todd.'

“Oh, yes. Todd likes her? Are they a 'thing'?'

“I don't think Todd knows what to make of her. She's so bright and prim and grownup-talking. Like a very smart but repressed Victorian child. She doesn't drool over him, so he's not scared of her like he would be of any other girl. And she seems to genuinely like the same things he does. One day she brought over a microscope and a bunch of rather revolting slides of things like ant feet and fly wings. Nothing could have charmed him more. He's really not interested in girls yet, even though it's macho to pretend he is, and is sort of embarrassed at having one follow him around.”

Shelley nodded. 'I heard my son and his friends using an extraordinarily rude word the other day for a part of the female anatomy. I eavesdropped for a bit and discovered they thought it meant a girl's hairdo. I explained, as tactfully as possible, that it didn't mean that and I would wash out the mouth of any child who said it in my house again.'

“Did you tell them the real meaning?'

“Good Lord, no! Imagine if they went home and told their parents that Mrs. Nowack was educating them in gutter language.”

At that moment Todd came slamming into the house. 'Mom, help me! That Pet is on her way here. I saw her coming down the street.'

“I can't save you. Into each life some Pets must fall.'

“Mom, I'm serious! She saw me come in the house. What'll I do?'

“You'll be nice to her,' Jane said mildly. 'Let her play with your hamsters.'

“Every time she touches them she has to wash her hands afterwards like she was getting ready for surgery! Oh, okay. Okay.”

Pet was at the front door a few minutes later. 'That house next door to yours is rather garish, isn't it, Mrs. Jeffry,' she said. She made it sound as if it just might be Jane's fault.

“Garish,' Jane said. 'Yes, excellent word for it. Come in, Pet. Todd's just gone up to change his clothes. Come in the kitchen and have some milk and cookies with Mrs. Nowack and me.'

“I can't eat sweets because I didn't bring along my toothbrush,' Pet said. 'But thank you anyway. I'm sure they're very good. And I can't drink milk from the grocery store. My father has special milk delivered.'

“Soy or something, I guess,' Jane said. 'You know what? I have lemonade and also extra toothbrushes that haven't even been unwrapped. You can have a cookie and a toothbrush,' Jane said, wondering how a real live child could be this proper and noble. She needed to be tickled or something.'Thank you so much, Mrs. Jeffry.”

Her eating was as prissy as her speech. She munched the cookie in little rabbity nibbles, holding a napkin at chest level to catch any crumbs. Jane knew Pet was in seventh grade with Todd, but she was one of the late bloomers. Gangly, flat-chested, and looking like she had a larger person's teeth filling her mouth, she was still a knobby-kneed little girl. Jane could remember some of Katie's friends at the same age looking like twenty-five- year-old models. Or at least giving it a good try. But Pet, with her bottle-bottom glasses and tightly braided hair, had a long way to go and didn't appear to be in any hurry.

“It must take your mother ages to braid your hair every morning,' Jane said as she poured Pet a glass of lemonade.

“I don't have a mother. She died in a car wreck.'

“Oh, Pet. I'm so sorry,' Jane exclaimed. 'I had no idea.'

“It's okay. I was little. I don't remember her, not exactly. But I have lots of pictures of her. My father braids my hair.”

Jane was saved from asking any more inadvertently awkward questions by Todd. 'Oh, hi, Pet,' he said as if he were surprised to find her there. 'What's up?'

“My dad gave me a computer program about pyramids,' Pet said. 'I thought you might like to see it. You can build a sarcophagus with it and move treasures around inside to foil grave robbers and wrap up mummies.'

“Do you want me to load it on my computer in the basement?' Jane asked. She had a small office in the basement where she worked on what she'd come to think of as the Endless Novel. She estimated that it was three-quarters done and was going to really, really work on it after the holidays. She remembered thinking the same thing last Christmas. But at least she was two hundred pages farther along now than then.

“I know how to load programs, Mrs. Jeffrey. I just hope you have enough RAM.”

For some reason, Pet's behavior made Jane want to be a child for her. Show her how it was done. She nearly said, 'Ram, schram, bippity barn' with a girlish laugh, but forced herself to reply only, 'I don't know, Pet. Can you tell when you turn it on?'

“Is it an old computer?' Pet asked.

“No, only about two or three years old.”

Pet allowed herself a slight smile. 'That's very old for a computer.'

“Then you may use my laptop. It's only a few months old. It's downstairs, too.”

Pet and Todd went down the basement stairs and Jane quietly closed the door behind them. 'Oh, dear. Poor little thing,' Jane said to Shelley. 'At least she forgot about brushing her teeth. I guess there's hope for her.'

“You never know,' Shelley said. 'She could get a figure and contacts and take down her hair someday and turn into a blues singer in a slinky purple-sequined dress.”

Jane shook her head. 'No, I think she's going to get stronger glasses and go around in a lab coat with a pocket protector.'

“Pocket protector! Oh, I know who she is now,' Shelley said. 'There was a Sam Dwyer sitting in the hall with me waiting to see the teacher at the same time I was last week. A real, live grown-up geek of the first order. Not really too bad-looking, but the tidiest man I've ever met. Real short hair, glasses as thick as Pet's, and a very narrow tie that he must have been babying along since the seventies. I tried to make conversation with him, but it was heavy going. He simply didn't want to talk to me.'

“Imagine!' Jane said, grinning.

“I was irritated,' Shelley admitted. 'I was just curious about him and he wouldn't tell me anything about himself.'

“Sounds like both of them need to hang out with a blues singer in a slinky purple-sequined dress.”

Shelley took another cookie. 'These things are addictive,' she complained. 'It's a shame they're so ugly. Now that I think about it and have met little Pet, I'm even more curious.'

“You're as nosy as Lance King,' Jane said.

Shelley drew herself up indignantly. 'But my motives are pure, unlike his. I don't want to wreck people's lives, just know about them. And maybe be helpful. There aren't that many single men in the neighborhood and I thought maybe Suzie Williams—”

Jane yelped with laughter. 'Suzie Williams? He doesn't exactly sound like Suzie's type!' She was the one who'd accompanied Jane to meet the Johnsons, and she made no bones about wanting to get out of selling lingerie at the local department store via marriage to a man who could support her in style.

Shelley said, 'Suzie's 'type' of man is anyone with decent table manners and a balanced checkbook with lots of lovely money in it. Or so she claims.'

“I think it's all a facade. I think Suzie wants to be in love,' Jane said. 'You'll see. Someday she'll fall head over heels with a dashing but unemployed race-car driver with long hair and a dazzling come-hither smile. Sort of like that sexy World War One guy in the pizza ad.'

“You don't think she's the one to bring the Dwyers, father and daughter, into the human race?' Shelley asked.

“I think she'd scare them to death. I imagine you scare them.'

“I only scare people when I need to,' Shelley said smugly.

Jane opened the basement door, listened for a moment, nodded approval of what she heard. 'Want more