The Little Friend

“Well, girls, you’ll have to talk to her yourself. Ida agrees with me that neither of us are happy with the way things have been working out around here.”

There was a long pause.

“Why’d you tell Ida that I told on her?” Harriet said. “What’d you say?”

“We’ll talk about this later.” Charlotte swung around and lay down on the bed.

“No! Now!”

“Don’t worry, Harriet,” Charlotte said. She closed her eyes. “And don’t cry, Allison, please don’t, I can’t stand it,” she said, her voice trailing fitfully away. “It’ll all work out. I promise.…”

Screaming, spitting, scratching, biting: none of these were adequate to the rage that blazed up in Harriet. She stared down at her mother’s serene face. Peacefully her chest rose; peacefully her chest fell. Moisture glistened on her upper lip, where the coral lipstick had faded and feathered up into the tiny wrinkles; her eyelids were oily and bruised-looking, with deep hollows like thumb-prints at the inner corner.

Harriet went downstairs, leaving Allison at her mother’s bedside, smacking the banister with her hand. Ida was still in her chair and staring out the window with her cheek cupped in her palm and as Harriet stopped in the doorway and gazed at her sorrowfully Ida seemed to glow up out of her surroundings with a merciless reality. Never had she seemed quite so palpable, so fixed and robust and marvelously solid. Her chest, beneath the thin gray cotton of her faded dress, heaved powerfully with her breath. Impulsively, Harriet started over to the chair but Ida—the tears still glistening on her cheeks—turned her head and gave her a look that stopped her where she stood.

For a long time, the two of them looked at each other. The two of them had had staring contests since Harriet was small—it was a game, a test of wills, something to laugh about but this time it was no game; everything was wrong and terrible and there was no laughter when Harriet, at last, was forced to drop her eyes in shame. And in silence—for there was nothing else to do—Harriet hung her head and walked away, with the beloved sorrowful eyes burning into her back.

————

“What’s wrong?” said Hely when he saw Harriet’s dull, dazed expression. He’d been about to let her have it for taking so long, but the look on her face made him feel sure that they were both in big, big trouble: the worst trouble of their lives.

“Mother wants to fire Ida.”

“Tough,” said Hely agreeably.

Harriet looked at the ground, trying to remember how her face worked and her voice sounded when everything was okay.

“Let’s get the bikes later,” she said; and she was heartened by how casual her voice came out sounding.

“No! My dad’s going to kill me!”

“Tell him you left it over here.”

“I can’t just leave it out there. Somebody’ll steal it.… Look, you told me you would,” said Hely despairingly. “Just walk over there with me.…”

“Okay. But first you have to promise—”

“Harriet, please. I put up all this junk for you and everything.”

“Promise you’ll go back with me tonight. For the box.”

“Where you going to take it?” said Hely, brought up short. “We can’t hide it at my house.”

Harriet held up both hands: no fingers crossed.

“Fine,” said Hely, and held his hands up, too—it was their own private sign language, as binding as any spoken promise. Then he turned and broke into a fast walk, through the yard and down to the street, with Harriet right behind him.

————

Sticking close to the shrubbery and ducking behind trees, they were within forty feet or so of the frame house when Hely seized Harriet’s wrist, and pointed. On the median, a long spike of chrome glinted from beneath the unwieldy spread of the summersweet bush.

Cautiously, they advanced. The driveway was empty. Next door, at the house belonging to the dog Pancho and his mistress, was parked a white county car which Harriet recognized as Mrs. Dorrier’s. Every Tuesday, at three-forty-five, Mrs. Dorrier’s white sedan rolled slowly up to Libby’s house and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier, in her blue Health Service uniform, come to take Libby’s blood pressure: pumping the cuff tight around Libby’s little bird-boned arm, counting the seconds on her large, masculine wristwatch while Libby—who was unspeakably distressed by anything remotely to do with medicine, or illness or doctors—sat gazing at the ceiling, her eyes filling with tears behind her glasses, her hand pressed to her chest and her mouth trembling.

“Let’s do it,” Hely said, glancing over his shoulder.

Harriet nodded at the sedan. “The nurse is over there,” she whispered. “Wait till she leaves.”

They waited, behind a tree. After a couple of minutes, Hely said: “What’s taking so long?”

“Dunno,” said Harriet, who was wondering the same thing herself; Mrs. Dorrier had patients all over the county and was in and out of Libby’s in a flash, never loitering to chat or have a cup of coffee.