out of bed in a rush and the wig was turned around backwards. That looked idiotic, like he was peeking out through one of those Hawaiian hula dancer’s skirts. It made his daughters laugh until they peed their pants.
One thing she did know for sure was that JannaRose was right behind her. She didn’t even have to look around. Their friendship had reached a stage where she got subconscious signals. She always knew exactly where JannaRose was and what she was doing, the same as she always knew what she was wearing, although that wasn’t difficult. A T-shirt and sweats. They used to joke about these psychic powers of Nina’s. “Okay, how many orgasms did I have last night?” JannaRose would ask. “You mean real ones?” Nina would answer. It would start them laughing until they had to hold each other up.
“Stay right there.” Nina barely glanced around.
“What?”
“Don’t move.” Whether she’d done it consciously or not, JannaRose had drifted out into the middle of the street, and if she stayed right where she was, the truck was still blocked. Nina ran up the steps and yanked D.S.’s crutch out from under his arm. He didn’t particularly need it, since he was almost totally healed from the last time a customer beat him up, but he kept it around since he usually needed it several times a year. And even when he didn’t — when something happened that made him nervous, he leaned on it.
“What?” D.S. said, stumbling around. The girls shuffled to stay out of his way, something that wasn’t all that easy with everybody already sticking out over the edges of the porch. But they managed to do it without taking their eyes off the truck, which — it was obvious from the expressions on their faces — they knew was going to do something impossibly fabulous any second now, something far more fabulous than anything they had ever dared to dream of. They didn’t look as if they would survive the wait.
When Nina dashed back into the road holding the crutch near the bottom like it was an axe, it didn’t get through to her children that something else was going to happen instead. It didn’t even get through to them when she hauled the crutch back over her shoulder as if she was about to take a big swing at the windshield right in front of the driver. He was the only one who reacted in any way at all.
“Hey!” he said, in his amplified twelve-year-old voice, although now that Nina was getting a closer look, he seemed even younger.
“Get out of here,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Go on. I’m counting to three.” She took a practice chop, swinging until the armpit-end of the crutch nearly touched the glass.
That was when something finally got through to the girls, something impossibly horrible, far more horrible than anything else would ever be in their whole lives. They squealed in agony. “What’s she doing?”
“What’re you doing?” It was D.S. again, only this time it really was a question. He was getting nervous, and she had his crutch out there when he needed it more than he ever had before.
The kid leaned his head out the side window. “I can’t hear what you’re saying,” he said.
Nina hauled the crutch back. “I said” — each word came out like it was a rock and she was heaving them to him one at a time — “get your truck off of this street.”
This seemed definitely okay with the kid. It was as if he’d already decided that this miserable street in the worst part of town wasn’t a place where he wanted to get into a big dispute. “You’ll have to get out of the way, then,” he said.
Nina rested the crutch on her shoulder. “Nope.”
“Huh?”
“Turn around.” She made a twirly motion with her finger.
The kid studied the situation in his mirrors. “There isn’t room.”
“Then back up.”
The driver was really young, and a complete stranger, and didn’t appear the slightest bit sure of himself, but that wasn’t what made it unusual. What made it unusual was that Nina had never gotten right in anybody’s face before, never gone full-tilt at anyone, if you don’t count D.S., and that was like going full-tilt at a baggie of Jell-O. Later on she told JannaRose that through it all, she never had any idea of where what she did next or where what she said came from. She was as amazed as everybody by everything that happened. And at that moment, after she told the kid he was going to have to back out of there, she felt as if she was in one of those scenes she’d seen in movies where everything suddenly freezes. Where nobody can move at all.
Until — she was so startled, she jumped, everybody did — some guy came out of nowhere and slipped up beside her. He was wearing a grey plastic windbreaker zipped all the way up and his pants were so wrinkly and bunched they didn’t even reach down as far as his socks. She’d never seen him before, that she could remember, even though it turned out he was the welfare inspector who put the ladder up every night and spied on her through the little clear spot he’d rubbed on the window to see if she had a man on the premises.
“We know what you’re up to,” he sneered in a menacing whisper. Her eyes popped wide open as she tried to figure out what was going on. “But it won’t work. So,” he sneered, “you can just forget it.” And he ran away, scrunching his shoulders around his ears so nobody would recognize him.
“Who the hell was that?” D.S. shouted.
“Why don’t you shut up?” she shouted back. “I’m busy.”
The ice cream kid sounded like he didn’t know what to do. With cars parked on both sides, barely one whole lane was open. “Back up?” he said.
“Bet you could take out one of the headlights.” Whenever JannaRose got the feeling that things were going to spin out of her grasp, she tried to tone them down, so it was entirely understandable that she would suggest a moderate alternative.
Nina knew what she was getting at, but it went right past D.S. “Don’t you encourage her,” he yelled.
“Uh-uh,” Nina told JannaRose.
“What’d she say?” D.S. shouted.
What she’d said was all JannaRose needed to hear to understand that this wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment, completely out-of-her-freaking-mind moment. That Nina wasn’t held in a death grip by some irrational, violent impulse. What she’d said was Why settle for the two dollars you find on the sidewalk when you can use it to buy a lottery ticket and go for all the millions? “Okay,” JannaRose said, sounding as if she was passing every single ounce of faith she had over to her friend, and moving out of the way.
Nina hauled the crutch back again. She hauled it back farther. She hauled it back as far as she could.
D.S. groaned. But the possibility that he might do anything more than that, already slight since having his neighbours see him wearing the wig and nightie always made him worry that they might not take him as seriously as they should, became absolute zero when the man who’d snuck up beside Nina and whispered to her appeared beside the porch.
“We don’t like lesbos, either,” he sneered as D.S. gaped at him uncomprehendingly. “Just because there’s nothing in the law about lesbos sharing a residence with a welfare recipient doesn’t mean we like them.” The way he wrote in his notebook made D.S. think he
