Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

“Well, goodness,” said Edie, mollified. “Thank you.”

“Listen, that’s the most dangerous intersection in the county! I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. It’s a shame, but somebody’s going to have to get killed out there before the Board of Supervisors sits up and takes notice. Killed .”

It was with surprise that Edie found herself softening to Mr. Dial’s manner—which was most agreeable, particularly as he seemed convinced that the accident could in no way have been her fault. And when he gestured out to the new Cadillac parked at the curb (“just a courtesy … thought you might need a loaner for a couple of days …”) she was not nearly so hostile at the sly liberty as she would have been even a few minutes before, and walked out with him, obligingly, as he went over all the features: leather seats, tape deck, power steering (“This beauty’s just been on the lot for two days, and I have to say that the minute I saw it, I thought: now here is the perfect car for Miss Edith!”). To watch his demonstrations of the automatic windows and so forth was oddly satisfying, considering that only a short while ago some folks had been so presumptuous as to suggest that Edie should not drive at all.

On he talked. Edie’s pain pill was wearing off. She tried to cut him short but Mr. Dial—pressing his advantage (for he knew, from the tow-truck driver, that the Oldsmobile was bound for the junk-yard)—began to throw out incentives: five hundred dollars knocked off the list price—and why? Palms spread: “Not out of the goodness of my heart. No ma'am, Miss Edith. I’ll tell you why. Because I’m a good businessman, and because Dial Chevrolet wants your business.” In the rich summer light, as he stood explaining why he would also extend the extended warranty, Edie—with a stab of pain in her breastbone—had a sharp ugly nightmare-flash of impending old age. Aching joints, blurry eyes, constant aspirin after-taste in the back of the throat. Peeling paint, leaky roofs, taps that dripped and cats that peed on the carpet and lawns that never got mowed. And time: time enough to stand in the yard for hours listening to any con artist or shyster or “helpful” stranger who drifted down the pike. How often had she driven out to Tribulation to find her father the Judge chatting in the driveway with some salesman or unscrupulous contractor, some grinning gypsy tree pruner who would later claim that the quote was per limb , not per tree; companionable Judases in Florsheim shoes offering him girlie magazines and nips of whiskey, with all kinds of ground-floor opportunities and incredible overrides in between; mineral rights, protected territories, enough no-risk investments and Chances of a Lifetime to finally relieve the poor old fellow of all he owned, including his birthplace….

With an increasingly black and hopeless feeling, Edie listened. What was the use of fighting? She—like her father—was a stoic old pagan; though she attended church as a civic and social duty, she did not actually believe a word of what was said there. Everywhere were green graveyard smells: mown grass, lilies and turned dirt; pain pierced her ribs every time she took a breath and she could not stop thinking of the onyx and diamond brooch inherited from her mother: which she’d packed, like a stupid old woman, in an unlocked suitcase which now lay in the unlocked trunk of a wrecked car, across town. All my life , she thought, I have been robbed. Everything I ever loved has been taken from me .

And somehow Mr. Dial’s companionable presence was a strange comfort: his flushed face, the ripe smell of his after-shave and his whinnying, porpoise laugh. His fussy manner—at odds with the solid ripeness of his chest beneath the starched shirt—was queerly reassuring. I always did think he was a nice looking man , thought Edie. Roy Dial had his faults but at least he wasn’t so impertinent as to suggest that Edie wasn’t competent to drive…. “I will drive,” she had thundered at the pipsqueak eye doctor, only a week earlier, “I don’t care if I kill everybody in Mississippi….” And while she stood listening to Mr. Dial talk about the car, laying his plump finger on her arm (just one more thing to tell her, and one more after that, and then, by the time she was thoroughly tired of him, asking: what would I have to say to make you my customer? This instant? Tell me what I have to say in order to get your business ….); while Edie, strangely powerless for once to disengage herself, stood and listened to his pitch, Libby, after becoming sick in a basin, lay down on her bed with a cool cloth on her forehead and slipped into a coma from which she was never to awake.

A stroke. That was what it was. When she’d suffered the first one, no one knew. Any other day, Odean would have been there—but Odean had the week off, because of the trip. When Libby finally answered the door—it had taken her a while, so long that Allison thought that maybe she was asleep—she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and her eyes were a little blurry. She looked at Allison as if she was expecting someone else.

“Are you all right?” Allison asked. She’d heard all about the wreck.

“Oh, yes,” said Libby, distractedly.

She let Allison in, and then wandered away into the back of the house like she was looking for something she’d misplaced. She seemed fine except for a splotchy bruise on her cheekbone, the color of grape jelly spread thin, and her hair not as tidy as she usually liked it.

Allison said, glancing around: “Can’t you find your newspaper?” The house was spanking clean: floors freshly mopped, everything dusted and even the sofa cushions plumped and properly placed; somehow the very tidiness of the house had kept Allison from realizing that anything might be wrong. Sickness, in her own house, had to do with disorder: with grimy curtains and gritty bedsheets; drawers left open and crumbs on the table.

After a brief search, Allison found the newspaper—folded to the crossword, with her glasses sitting on top of it—on the floor by Libby’s chair, and carried them in to the kitchen, where Libby sat at the table, smoothing the tablecloth with one hand in a tight, repetitive circle.

“Here’s your puzzle,” said Allison. The kitchen was uncomfortably bright. Despite the sun pouring through the curtains, the overhead lights were on for some reason, as if it were a dark winter afternoon and not the middle of summer. “Do you want me to get you a pencil?”

“No, I can’t work that foolish thing,” Libby said fretfully, pushing the paper aside, “the letters keep sliding off the page…. What I need to do is go ahead and get started on my beets.”

“Beets?”

“Unless I start now they won’t be ready in time. The little bride’s coming into town on the Number 4….”

“What bride?” said Allison, after a slight pause. She’d never heard of the Number 4, whatever that was. Everything was bright and unreal. Ida Rhew had left only an hour before—just like any other Friday except that she wasn’t coming back on Monday or ever again. And she’d taken nothing but the red plastic glass she drank out of: in the hallway, on the way out, she had refused the carefully wrapped cuttings and the box of presents, which she said was too heavy to carry. “I ain’t need all of that!” she said, cheerily, turning to look Allison straight in the eye; and her tone was that of someone offered a button or a piece of licked candy by a toddler. “What you think I need all that nonsense for?”

Allison—stunned—fought not to cry. “Ida, I love you,” she said.

“Well,” said Ida, thoughtfully, “I love you too.”