Monsters | Page 8

an hour early? Shit, we should go home
now. We've already done a hell of a lot more than he had any right to
expect." Then she chuckled; Celeste wasn't built to pout. "Well, if
you'll bag up the cleaning, I'll move over to shirts."
"Sure."
"You're an odd one, you know that, Henry? At first I thought that you
didn't like me. Then Jerry said you didn't like anyone. But we talked
today and you survived. My guess is that you're just shy."
He hung the last pair of pants.
"Mind if I ask you a question?"
He sighed.
"What are you doing after work?"
Ê
It had been three years since Henry had last ridden in a car -- not since

he first started having bad thoughts. Now he remembered why. The bus
might be crowded and slow but it was safe as the living room couch.
Cars were vicious. The streets seethed with tense, drunk, angry,
worried, impatient drivers. They were lost, late, stuck in traffic and
their windshields kept fogging up. There was no place to park, some
scut had just cut them off, so they screamed back at their radios. He
could see them jittering behind the steering wheels of their weapons,
feel the darkness inside him feasting on their anger.
He should have known better than to disrupt the routines. The monster
was back.
"It's because they think I'm their mother," said Celeste, who drove as if
she were alone on the road. "For a cat, leaving a dead mouse in the
middle of the kitchen floor is the best way to say 'I love you.' They
can't understand why I'm not grateful. Probably think I'm crazy."
Her junker '82 Escort would have lost a collision with a lunchbox. He
grasped the shoulder belt with his left arm; his right hand crushed the
armrest on the door. Something was happening.
"My mom used to say that there are two kinds of people in the world,
cat people and dog people. But come to find out there're all kinds of
people. Bird people, fish people, snake people, plant people, even
petless people. Bet that's you. You don't strike me as the pet type."
He shook his head.
"See? So what does that mean? That you're not human?"
Riding a tuna wagon down the mean streets was bad enough, but what
really spooked him was Celeste's driving. She was barely tall enough to
see over the dashboard. He had never realized how big her hump was
until he had watched her wiggle it into the tiny car. It forced her
forward so that she seemed to be looking through the steering wheel at
the road. Except she wasn't. She kept trying to make eye contact with
him while she babbled about cats.

"Of course, Slippers leaves most of the little prizes, these days. Figaro
isn't quite the mouser he used to be since the operation. They cut a
tumor off his chest. Cost me two hundred dollars. So what about your
dad? You didn't say whether he's covered by insurance or not."
"We're okay." Henry should never have told her that he always visited
his dad on the way home from work. And then he should've realized
what would happen when she'd asked what hospital he was in. And
then he should've lied about the forty minute bus ride that got him there
fifteen minutes before visiting hours ended. He and his dad did not
have that much to say to one another anyway.
"Pick a lane, Grandma!" She swerved around a LeBaron with Alabama
plates. "That's good, because a hospital bill can kill you faster than any
peckerhead doctor. Believe me, it'd be cheaper for him to stay in the
presidential suite at the Sheraton. Probably more fun. How is he taking
it anyway? My mother died of lung cancer, which isn't surprising
seeing as how she smoked like Pittsburgh. She was a okay mom, better
than I deserved. But I'll tell you, she was a bitch at the end. It was
really hard."
"He's drugged," said Henry. "Doesn't talk much."
She signalled for a left turn and the Escort rattled up the ramp onto the
interstate. "See," she said. "Almost there. Dad will have a nice
surprise." As the speedometer skulked toward seventy, Henry braced
against the floorboards hard enough to leave footprints. "I think the
worst of it was when she decided she had to find God before she died.
She hadn't been within spitting distance of a church for forty years and
the next thing I know she's a born-again Baptist. Three weeks later I
buried her. Only I have to put up with this douchebag in a collar who
throws dirt on her and talks about how she's eating bon-bons with Jesus
in