Seventeen Against the Dealer (23 page)

“I usually get that in any case,” Sammy pointed out.

“Then what've you got to lose?”

“No, you've got it all wrong. The question is, What have I got to win?”

T
he next morning, when Dicey knocked on the door of Gram's room, Gram sat up in bed, her shoulders supported by pillows. She had eaten half of a piece of toast, and finished the mug of tea. Dicey half-expected Gram to try to talk her way out of the X ray, and she wasn't planning to take any guff. “We have to go to Salisbury,” she said, giving Gram no time to say anything. “You need to get dressed. I'll warm up the truck.”

“I wouldn't hurry,” Gram advised her. “It'll take me a while. And no, I don't want help. I can dress myself.”

It was half an hour before Gram came out of her room. Dicey had washed the dishes and wiped down all the counters. She had swept the floor. She had gotten the cab of the truck warm. She had dried the dishes and put them away. She had just begun to wonder if she should worry, or knock on Gram's door again, when that door opened.

Gram looked pale, and old. She moved as if she wasn't sure her legs would hold her up for long. She wore her rubber boots and a skirt, and a thick sweater buttoned down over the skirt. Her body looked thick and round, but her face looked thin. Dicey got up to get her coat, and hat, and gloves, and finally a scarf. “Are you wearing something warm next to your skin?” she asked.

“No, and I won't. They're just going to tell me to get undressed when I get there—if I haven't boiled to death on the way up.”

Dicey didn't argue. Some things weren't worth arguing about.

They drove up in silence. Gram leaned her head back against the seat and kept her eyes closed. Dicey left her off at the main entrance to the hospital. “Go sit in a chair. I'll be right there.” Gram just nodded.

At the X-ray department they waited, and waited, side by side on a sofa. Their shoulders touched as they sat, waiting to be called. After Gram went off with a nurse, Dicey waited alone. She felt as if the morning stretched out endlessly, before her and behind her. She felt as if she had fallen into some time sack, hanging off time's usual line of tightly twisted minutes, and was just hanging there, outside of time. When Gram reappeared, buttoning her sweater, Dicey got up. She held out her grandmother's coat and then put an arm around her bulky shoulders, as if to help her walk. Gram didn't protest.

Back in the truck, heading home along the highway, Dicey looked over at her grandmother. “Are you all right?”

Gram nodded her head without opening her eyes. “I'll be glad to get back to bed. Which is, I trust, our destination.”

“Doctor's orders,” Dicey answered. “Then I'll call her office and take care of everything.”

“You drape yourself over this plate,” Gram said slowly. “Jaybird naked. Which is a strange phrase, now I think of it, since jays have feathers. The young woman wouldn't even stay in the same room with that machine. It's as if medicine were as dangerous as disease.”

“James explained to me once that the principle is to figure out how to poison the disease without killing off the host body,” Dicey said. She looked at Gram, waiting for her opinion on that—although she could guess what huffing and puffing response Gram's commonsensical mind would have. Her grandmother, head leaning back, didn't say anything. Her profile—forehead,
nose, chin; cheekbones and eyebrows, eyelids closed down over her eyes—“You're as pretty as Maybeth,” Dicey said. She'd never realized that before. If she hadn't thought Gram was asleep, she wouldn't ever have said it out loud.

“I was, in my day,” Gram answered. She opened one eye, turning her head slightly toward Dicey. “I'd be obliged if you'd watch the road.”

*  *  *

Gram got herself back into bed while Dicey called Dr. Landros's office. The receptionist answered her question—yes, it was pneumonia, in the left lung; the doctor had called in two prescriptions to the drugstore and they should be picked up right away; no, Gram was in no danger, no immediate danger, but she had to stay in bed for a week, and in the house for at least two weeks after that, until her lung cleared up; the doctor would stop by after office hours this afternoon; and how was James doing? Dicey, not surprised that the news was good but still relieved, looked in on Gram, who was asleep. She wrote a note saying where she'd be going. She put the note, folded to stand up, on the table by the glass of fresh ice water she'd brought in, in case Gram woke up thirsty, and went downtown to have the prescriptions filled, getting there and back fast.

By the time Maybeth and Sammy came home, Dicey had washed the kitchen windows, made two bowls of Jell-O, begun the slow simmering of a chicken for creamed chicken, and ironed four shirts. She didn't know which of the shirts belonged to which of her siblings, as she set them onto hangers and hung them off a doorknob.

“It's pneumonia for sure,” she greeted them.

“Is that good?” Maybeth asked.

“They know how to treat pneumonia,” Sammy explained.
“I'm starving,” he announced, opening the refrigerator door. “There's mail for you,” he told Dicey. “Jell-O? Is this Jell-O?”

“It's for Gram.”

“Do you think she'll share?” Sammy asked.

“You might as well open this door.” They heard Gram's voice. “Now you've woken me up.”

Sammy looked at Maybeth and Dicey. He was grinning. “Good-o,” he greeted his grandmother's complaint.

Dicey's mail was from Claude, a check for $839. The note he sent with it answered her question at the size of the check. “The rate you're going, you'll have the next ten done before you get this. I've included the fourteen dollars for the window. Temperature down here was seventy-two at noon yesterday. Eat your heart out.”

Dicey wasn't about to eat her heart out; a temperature of seventy-two degrees in February was unnatural. She had a check for $839 to deposit into her account. The bank would be closed by now, but she had the check. So that was okay. And Gram had pneumonia and they'd have to keep her in bed, which wouldn't be easy, but that was okay, too. Jeff wasn't okay, or that wasn't, but that was her own stupid fault.

In the evening, while Sammy and Maybeth did homework in the kitchen, Dicey called Cisco, who assured her that everything was going along fine. Then she called James. “Gram's got pneumonia,” she told her brother, “but it's fine now, she's taking medicine. Dr. Landros said.”

“I'm glad she had the sense to call a doctor,” James's voice announced. Then it smiled. “Or someone did.”

“It was someone,” Dicey said, “and only after a while, but we've learned our lesson. We're going to have to keep her in bed, and in the house, for a long time, which won't be easy, but we'll gang up on her. Anyway, that's our news. How's school?” Before
James could tell her, she remembered, “James? What did you do about that course, with the professor who liked you?”

“Didn't they tell you?”

“I haven't been around all that much.”

“I wish I were home. It makes me worry, Gram getting pneumonia.”

“I know. I think even she got worried. She's being pretty cooperative.”

“Dr. Landros does say everything's all right?”

“I wouldn't lie.”

“No, you wouldn't. What you'd do is not call me up to tell me something was wrong.”

“I've called you now, James,” she reminded him. “Anyway, what did happen?”

“I'm auditing the course. My adviser worked it out for me. She told me I should tell Professor Browning I couldn't handle all the work, but that I wanted to continue attending. So I dropped it.”

“You don't mind?”

“Mind what? It got me out of a bind.”

“Mind saying you couldn't handle it. Or did you tell your friends the truth?”

“Cripes, Dicey, I couldn't do that. What if it got back to him? No, I didn't tell anyone, except my adviser, and she'll keep it quiet. My friends all just think I'm not the hotshot I was cracked up to be, which never hurts. I mean, it never hurts to have people think you've failed. They like you to have an Achilles' heel, right? But I have to take six courses this semester, to make up the credit, and I'm working like crazy—so they'll learn better. Because it never hurts to let people know how good you are, does it?”

James's brain never rested from following twists and turns. “Boy, do you like things complicated,” Dicey told him.

“Machiavellian,” he answered, “that's me. You know Machiavelli?”

“No, but I know someone who does, I bet.” Cisco knew just about everything; she'd ask him, the next time she got in to the shop.

“Can I say hello to Sammy and Maybeth before you hang up? We shouldn't talk, because it costs money. Dicey? I'm really glad Gram's okay, even if I didn't know ahead of time. I might even be glad you didn't tell me ahead of time—I had two tests and a paper in the last week.”

Midmorning on Tuesday, Dicey went into Gram's bedroom. She was bringing in a fresh glass of water. Gram sat up in bed, not doing anything. “Can I get you a book?” Dicey asked.

“I don't seem to have the energy to read,” Gram told her.

That wasn't like Gram. Dicey put down the water glass. “Are you taking your medicine?”

“Yes, and I'm feeling better for it.” Gram almost snapped that at her. “So save your worrying. I just sit here and think—how much better I feel. I don't feel any too good right now, but—I've been thinking. It was like having a weight dropped on me, or like being felled, like a tree being felled.”

Dicey sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why didn't you tell us?”

“Now I can get up and go to the bathroom and come back to bed—without having to lie down and take a rest during the process. Not once do I have to rest. Two days ago, I'd get into the bathroom, and sitting down wasn't good enough. Do you have any idea how cold it is lying on a bathroom floor, girl?”

“No idea at all.”

“It's cold,” Gram told her. “Why don't you leave me be in here? I'm thinking,” she said. “I don't know what you're doing with yourself—”

“Cleaning, laundry—we've gotten behind—”

“But it's so quiet. You're being pretty quiet about it. What about the shop?”

“It's fine.”

“You don't have to stay here mollycoddling me,” Gram told her.

“I'm not.” Dicey knew what Gram would say next so she didn't give her a chance. “This isn't mollycoddling, as you very well know. Mollycoddling is—toast in hot milk, and flowers on a tray. What I'm doing is just reasonable care.”

She stood up. Gram pulled the blanket up over the sweater she was wearing in bed. Dicey looked at her grandmother and her grandmother looked back at her. Dicey could see trouble, in about one day, when Gram started wanting to get out of bed and back to work. She didn't know how she was going to keep the woman in bed. She didn't know how she was going to make her stubborn grandmother obey the doctor's orders.

“I know what you're thinking, girl,” Gram said, “and I've learned my lesson. I didn't have to be as stupid as I was. So go on to whatever you're doing, and give me some quiet to think in.”

So Gram wasn't trying to get up. Dicey knew that now. And Gram knew that Dicey wasn't about to leave her alone in the house, with no one to take care of her if she needed care. Dicey left the room, contented.

T
hat afternoon, after Sammy and Maybeth got home from school, Dicey took the truck and went downtown. She didn't know where the idea had come from, but she thought it was a good idea, so she bought a machine to play cassette tapes. It was on sale for $99—probably because it was pink and nobody wanted it, or maybe because it was shaped like one of those old railroad-car diners and nobody wanted it. For Dicey, the important thing was that it sounded good. It had a radio, too, which she didn't think Gram would ever use, and a shoulder strap in case you wanted to carry it around with you, which she was sure Gram wouldn't. Dicey opened her checkbook, stuck Claude's check into the back, and paid for the tape player, $103.95 with the tax. That got her down to $11.77, but as soon as she could get to the bank she'd have lots of money.

She went to the library next, to pick out some tapes. That was the great thing, the library had tapes you could check out. She didn't know anything about music, so she went for big names—Mozart, Beethoven, Bach. Then her eye was caught by a name she'd never heard, Vivaldi. She liked that name, and she liked the name of the music,
The Four Seasons
. She wondered about how you went about turning the seasons of a year into music, and then she wondered how, if it wasn't a song that had words, you understood the meaning just from the notes. Probably, she
thought, driving home, eager to give Gram her present, there was a kind of language of music that if you studied it you could understand. Dicey felt pretty good, driving along—she had a surprise for Gram, who was really getting better, as anyone would see. The fields spread around her, spreading out from the road. Long, whitened grasses spread out over the ground, like frost. The sky above it all looked like a smudged charcoal drawing. Dicey's eyes looked around her, to see winter lying on the land, when snowflakes started to fall.

Snow was so sudden, the way it started. Even these wide, flat wet flakes, plopping onto the windshield, were just suddenly there. They hadn't been there and then they were, all at once. Dicey smiled to herself, thinking of how Sammy would be outside, hoping that school would close. She thought that if there was no school she and Maybeth would have an extra day to get ready for the history test. At least, she thought, feeling how she was feeling, she was doing all right by her family.