by Rob Summers
Chapter 3 Worry
At breakfast the next morning, Pride and Doubt sat in the nook off the kitchen and ate doughy, sweet confections, fresh from the microwave. The littered table, the intimacy of eating, gave Pride a feeling of homely safety. A thin spear of June sunshine pierced the room, shooting over the closed window shutters, and rebounded off the silvery, steel coffee pot.
“Oh my, no,” Doubt reassured him, “They’re all women of the world and won’t mind making themselves free with you. You’ll find them fun, and young, and they’re all decently pretty. And it works out very well for them.”
“Why? Are they hard up?”
Doubt did not answer. Her gray little face was like a switched off TV screen, it’s only character produced by the powdered sugar around her mouth.
“Well, what do they do?” Pride pressed.
“Do? They do nothing. That’s why they rely on such situations as this.”
“You mean they just go from house to house and—”
“I’m sure I don’t intrude into the details of their lives. I simply help them when I can. I’ve had the servants prepare them rooms. The first of them should be here this afternoon.”
Pride was perched on a window seat looking out over the front steps when the cab arrived. She stepped out and stood so long looking up at the building that Pride thought she must have seen him. She was young, but not, as Doubt had advertised, decently pretty. Rather, she was plump and short and, in the warm sunshine, wore a fur hat and a black raincoat that hung to her thick ankles.
At last, suitcases in hand, she made her way up the wide outside steps in a puzzlingly meandering manner, and then trudged back and forth in every direction upon the concrete paved area before the door. From time to time she paused to strike the pavement sharply with her heel. She frowned. She muttered. She squinted. At last, the front bell rang, and with sinking heart, Pride stepped down to meet his guest.
Having received her friend at the door, Doubt turned to Pride with a hint of a smile and a strange, exhilarated look.
“Dear, here is Miss Worry. Worry, my husband.”
Worry stood like a lump, still clutching her suitcases. She seemed to regard Pride as some sort of germ.
“Is my room ready?” she demanded.
“Here, let us take your coat,” Doubt said.
“Not with these drafts, oh no!” She stepped away and sniffed the air speculatively. “Give me a large room with no windows and my own thermostat.”
“Of course,” said Doubt.
Worry turned earnestly to Pride. “And you have got to have the front steps and pavement repaired. That old concrete is giving way. Do you think I’d risk my weak ankles in such a place? I could stick my hand through the cracks! At the first opportunity, I’ll show you the exact spots.”
“At the first opportunity, ma’am,” Pride replied, but Worry appeared not to notice his tone. Doubt noticed and shot him a look of disapproval.
Worry went to one of the great pillars of the entrance hall and examined it carefully. She rapped it solidly with the edge of one of her bags.
“Just as I thought,” she said decisively. “Another one of those shoddy construction jobs. Hollow, Mr. Pride, hollow as a promise. When the City took over all the construction work, they hired shady contractors who cut a lot of corners. They used spindly, substandard framing and faked-up jobs like these pillars. You know what’s worse? The foundations are no good. It’s this sandy soil around here causes everything to shift and sink. Take a look at your roofline, mister. I just did from the street. It’s off level already. This house’ll go down like a cake with lead icing one of these days, and I only hope I’m not in it when it happens.”
Pride lost his patience. “You’re just barely in the door. Can’t you think of anything to say except that my house is going to collapse?”
She raised to him vaporous brown eyes with half circles beneath them. “Seventeen houses collapsed in this city in the past month,” she said.
“Well, in that case, why don’t you move into one with better foundations?”
“Aren’t any! They’re all built like this. It’s the scandalous construction code the crooked politicians have pushed through. When was the last time you voted?”
Doubt intervened. “Come now, Worry, and see your room.”
As she was leading Worry away, Doubt looked back over her shoulder. Pride frowned at her, pointed to Worry’s back, and shook his head. Doubt’s irregular teeth appeared in a smile.
She turned back to Worry. “Your room is just the way you want it: your own thermostat and your own bathroom—I remembered—and no windows. I’m sure you’re going to like it here.”