bit her lip. “I had to talk to him, to tell him what a
skunk he was, to make him
of course money from him would have been nice. I
don’t know how Walt will manage without me. He
hasn’t been the same since the farming went bad.” She
looked away, into the corner of the dining room, with
its quaint washstand, porcelain ewer, and pitcher. Judith thought the sight must have reminded the other
woman of home.
“Bruno was so snotty to me,” Meg went on, “so
mean, like he was after we were married. When I first
began to show with the baby, he called me Spider
Woman. He said that with the big belly and my scrawny
long arms and legs, I reminded him of a spider.”
“How cruel,” Judith said with a shake of her head.
“Bruno sounds as if he was held captive by his ego,
even then.”
“He was nice only in the beginning,” Meg said,
“when he was trying to seduce me. I was so green. I’d
never met anyone like him.”
Judith started to reach out to comfort Meg, but
thought better of it. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said.
“You were a farm girl from a small town. He was in
search of his Iowa roots, and already had the aura of
Southern California about him.” She paused, knowing
that Meg had a need to talk about the confrontation
with Bruno. “Night before last must have been very
hard when you finally faced him again.”
“It was and it wasn’t,” Meg responded, her sharp
features hardening even more. “I was glad that when I
finally saw him, he was feeling miserable. How the
mighty have fallen, I thought to myself. But then he
got nasty. When Bruno went to take some pills he had
in his hand, he opened the cupboard by the sink to
fetch a glass. Then he dropped one of the pills. When
he bent down to get it, he reared up so fast that he
banged his head on the cupboard door and knocked
himself silly. He fell right into the sink with all that
water in it. For a second I thought I should haul him
out.” Her face twisted with bitterness. “Then I thought,
to hell with him. He never cared about me, why should
I care about him? So I held his head under the water
until he stopped flailing around. Then I put the spider
over the sink and left.” Meg’s pallor had a strange
glow. She’d won the final battle with Bruno.
For a long time neither woman spoke. Judith forced
herself not to look in the direction of Meg’s purse.
“Your brother, Will,” Judith said at last, recalling the
