The Pines

crack lines traced the heavy white porcelain of the sugar bowl. The coffee smelled terrible.

Athena scalded her tongue. Foul. She blew on the cup, and steam swirled away, her glance following it. “I remember the day Wallace papered this ceiling. How many years ago? All coming down now. Ruined.” Oily residue collected thickly on the surface of her coffee, and she found herself idly examining the chipped opalescent cup. All the old things. A fine thing once, the cup had come from her grandmother’s house. Broken. Or worn out. Everything. That house…the way it smelled toward the end… When Granny Lee had lost her strength, everything had just fallen apart. That’s the way it’ll happen with me. Not that I’m doing so well as it is. She wondered how the cup had escaped being packed away, hidden with the rest of her grandmother’s things…as though they shamed her somehow. “Why does everything in this house have to be so…so dismal?”

“I never did understand why you would even want to live here,” said Pam. She waited for a response, then resumed, made bold by her sister-in-law’s uncustomary familiarity. “You ain’t, I mean, you’re not one of…of…” Agitated, she halted. “I mean, you’re not like a piney. You’re too good for…”

“Oh yes. I have fine qualities.”

Pamela faltered, confused by the bitterness of the brief laugh. “I mean, it just don’t seem right that you”— she gulped coffee and blushed—“that you…you…” Her voice became a pleading whine. “You know, I was thinking to night, Lonny and Wallace was so different, for brothers, I mean. I mean, Lonny’s so dark, not like Wallace was. I guess there must really be some Indian blood in the family, like they say. And Lonny’s got them eyes.”

Athena took a deep breath, deciding she might as well make conversation. “Have you had a letter from Lonny recently?”

“Not in a long time.” Pam relaxed into the subject. “I told you, the last one said that guy who was writin’ them for him was gettin’ out. I sure miss him. Those eyes.” She gave a small, dramatic shiver. “The way he looks at me sometimes—sort of like an animal.”

The other woman stirred her coffee…around and around…and concentrated on the rattle of the spoon in the cup. It embarrassed her to hear Pamela talk this way. She knew Lonny Monroe neglected his wife, even during those rare intervals when he wasn’t doing time.

“Course most a those guys in prison is black. I, uh, you think…I mean, I always meant to ask you if it was true what they say about black guys having…I mean, the reason I ask is just…”

Athena didn’t know where to look. Resembling nothing so much as a transistor radio, the scanner lay on the table in front of her. Idly, she adjusted a control, and faint grumbling sounds issued forth.

“So, what happened today?” Pam giggled, leaning forward and fairly quivering with anticipation. “Go on any calls?”

Athena glanced at her eager face, then got up and limped to the door. “Out, Dooley.” She held the door open. “Go on out.” The shaggy brute of a dog rolled its head in her direction and exhaled heavily. Athena advanced purposefully, raising one foot as though to kick, and with vast reluctance, the dog struggled, yawning, to its feet, shook itself, then shambled with infinite slowness out the door and across the dark porch. She slammed the door.

“So what happened? Was it bloody?”

Tight-lipped with annoyance, Athena briefly sketched the events of the day, while Pam visibly savored every word. Finally, she described the last call and the woman who’d been so difficult. Ordinarily, she found Pamela’s company barely tolerable, but to night the alternative seemed worse.

“Them damn pineys,” Pam interrupted. “They just don’t know when they’re well-off.” Pamela had once worked a civilian munitions job at Fort Dix, and in her own eyes this forever exempted her from piney status. Weak static crackled from the scanner. “Wasn’t there no other calls today?”

She almost snapped but caught herself. “Actually…I don’t know how much longer I can afford to work on the rig.”

“What? You’re kidding!”

“The money’s almost gone.” Athena shrugged. The money—the few thousands that Granny Lee had left her. Every penny of Wallace’s had gone into the house before he died. “I can’t even pay you much longer. Not that I’ve even been very good about that.”

“I keep telling you, you don’t have to pay me.”

She stirred her coffee again. “I used to be so sure of myself.” She laughed. “God, I’ve made such a mess of things.”

Puzzlement spread over Pam’s face. “So, what are you gonna do? Get on welfare?”

“Like every other piney?” Grimly—as though it were the most important thing in the world—Athena examined her chewed and broken fingernails. “I hear there’s going to be an opening at the state hospital.”

Pam gasped. “But Matty’s…!”

“A job opening,” she explained hastily as she turned her gaze to the horrible coffee and mused on a future of spoon feedings and bedpans.

“Harrisville? But you can’t even stand to be around one….” Pamela blinked and set her cup down. “That’d be a real shame,” she continued carefully. “I mean, if you had to quit the ambulance and all. I know how much you like it.”

Athena waved a fly away from the sugar.

“Uh, you know, ’Thena, about welfare,” she explained with an audible gush of sympathy. “You could probably get some. I mean, since you got Matty and all.”

The other woman glanced up and then averted her eyes again.

Pam searched her face. Panicked by the conjunction of subjects—the boy and the asylum—she cast her eyes about wildly. The Ouija board had been pushed to one side of the table, and she pounced on it with desperate enthusiasm. “You want to play? You should of seen all the fun me and Matty had to night. Chabwok just wouldn’t shut up for some reason. You should of seen all the stuff he was saying. ‘Danger’ and ‘death’ and stuff.” She slid the board between them. “You want to play?” Pointed stars and moons with faces decorated the chipped and peeling board. An empty water glass rested upside down over the letters. “Come on,” she coaxed. “We can ask it about the ambulance!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on, I bet it says you’re gonna get money from some-wheres.”

“My grandmother had one of these.” She rested her hand lightly on the board. “She was so religious. Did I ever tell you? Something of an amateur spiritualist. All the neighbors and church folk always used to come in for advice.”

“Yeah? Like old Mother Jenks?”

“They used to try to give her money.” Athena’s voice stayed low and soft. “She’d never take it. ‘It’s a gift.’ That’s what she’d say. A gift.”

“You went to live with her after your mom died?”

“Did you hear something outside?”

“Prob’ly just the dog.”

“Shall we make the trip to mount Holly this week?” Changing the subject, Athena cleared her throat. “We must be out of nearly everything. I know we need sugar.”

“Yeah, all we really got is cans a soup. Remember, ’Thena, I bought all that stuff, and then I forgot and bought more?”

The red light on the scanner wavered, and Athena went absolutely still.

Pam could just make out what sounded like garbled numbers in the static. “What…?”

“Police dispatcher, out by Atsion.” She listened. “That’s an accident.”

“Will you have to go?”

She shushed her. “At this hour, usually they’ll call Burlington County.” For another moment, she strained to hear voices. “My mother’s not dead. She’s in a…a sort of a home.”

Outside was blackness, and the crickets raged. The two women sat in the grimy kitchen and listened to the scanner and planned a trip to a distant supermarket, the Ouija board untouched between them. “You hungry?” Pamela scrounged stale cookies out of a canister.

Small wonder they w ere running low, Athena reflected—her sister-in-law ate everything in sight. Setting down the pencil stub, she twisted dials on the scanner, trying to recapture fading words. Finally giving up with a