Tricia stood still and wrapped her arms around her body. “Uh, yah, right. We were talking about how he was an accountant. I thought that was neat, because we needed someone who was good with money. I was nice to him. He was nice to me. Things worked out.”
Gail’s stomach clenched. “So let me run this through,” Gail said. “You meet some strange man at a bar, you tell him about how we have a bunch of money we need someone to handle, and after he hears this, then he gets real friendly with you.”
“No! It wasn’t like that! He liked me.”
Gail frowned at Bart.
“Damn. Excuse my language,” he said, shaking his head. “I didn’t check. He was her boyfriend when Isabella got placed here. I didn’t think to ask how long they’d been together. We needed someone to handle the money and I didn’t check on him.”
“Oh, come on, now. He’s not some bad guy or something,” Tricia said, another protest, now plaintive. “He’ll turn up. It’s not like that.”
“First thing tomorrow morning, we go to the bank,” Gail said.
“Absolutely,” Bart said.
“While we’re here, I want you to give me signature authority on our account,” Gail said as she pushed open the heavy bank doors.
Bart didn’t argue. He dragged as he moved, as if he hadn’t slept well. He had to take off work to come to the bank this morning, but he didn’t say a word about it.
Kurt came with them as a bodyguard this morning, since he didn’t have any classes until after lunch. He followed with a dark frown. Gail and Bart hadn’t said anything about their business here, but rumors flew back at the household and Kurt had learned enough to be worried.
The account held everything the household had managed to scrimp and save. Many of the people in the household had contributed a significant part of their life savings to this account, so the household would be able to afford to purchase a place to live before winter. Virgil, dammit, had been the one who had urged everyone to contribute early, ‘so that they could count on it.’ His argument had made sense at the time. His argument didn’t sound nearly so good, now.
The four of them stayed silent as they made their way to the clerk. The clerk seemed to putter endlessly as he checked their account.
Even after all their suspicions, the response still shocked.
“I’m sorry,” the clerk said. “This account has a zero balance. A Mr. Conte withdrew the balance the day before yesterday.”
Bart and Gail’s eyes met. Gail blamed herself. Bart, to her surprise, blamed himself.
Gail realized she had finally won Bart’s respect. At a price she never wanted to pay again.
Focus
(20)
“Helen,” Gail said. “Thank you for coming. Please, sit down.”
Gail had commandeered one of the plywood-bottomed lawn chairs for her tent, for at least a few hours. She doubted anyone would miss this particular chair.
She couldn’t believe what her instincts told her. Her instincts demanded she have an office. Apparently. Gail found this frankly unbelievable.
Helen Grimm looked around the tent, wary, wiped her sweaty brow, and sat. The chair didn’t give, but it did sink into the soil a half inch, soil that after last night’s thunderstorm could be considered halfway to mud. The tent’s former plywood floor had half-rotted and did the crazy thing plywood did when wet, come apart into thin curling sheets. They had gotten rid of the mud-caked mess two days ago.
Helen wasn’t a light boned woman, either.
Gail wanted to mop her brow herself, now always sweating visibly every time the temperature climbed beyond eighty. Today, in the hot sunshine, she suspected the tent interior was far warmer than eighty.
“So, Focus, you want something from me?” Helen said.
Gail nodded. “Yes. I’m not sure what, but yes.”
Helen nodded. “Good. You need to be making use of all your resources.”
Gail blinked, startled. Perhaps she should have waited several more weeks to talk with Helen. “You consider yourself one of my resources?”
“Certainly. What do you need?”
“Ah.” Gail’s mind fumbled, not quite ready for Helen’s easy cooperation. This was the witch bitch Grimm; Gail expected her to say no reflexively to anything Gail asked. She and Sylvie had scoped out this conversation beforehand, anticipating all sorts of difficulties. She decided to start the conversation as they had planned, pretending Helen’s resource comment remained unspoken.
“First, I also wanted to apologize again, for my earlier behavior,” Gail said. “I was an ass. I’m so sorry.”
Something in the tone of Gail’s voice brought back the orange-haired older woman’s native steel spine. “An ass? I know asses when I see them, and you, Focus, weren’t an ass.” Gail sat up straight and paid attention, her mental equilibrium bouncing away, forgotten. How did Helen manage to do this to her every time? Can I learn her tricks? “You were just thrown by being thrust into a new situation, not one of your own choice.”
“Uh, thanks, I think,” Gail said. So much for her idea that inviting Helen and Melanie, her other two Focus attendants, into the loop with Sylvie, Kurt and Van, would be easy. She should have guessed someone as forceful as Helen would instinctively take over the conversation before Gail even finished the painful pleasantries.
“You’re welcome,” Helen said, not quite a lie, but close. Gail studied the formerly well-swept tent bottom dirt. Before this summer, she hadn’t realized damp dirt, half-way to being mud, stank. She couldn’t think up a single thing to say in response. She tried to gather her thoughts, and as she gathered, Helen stepped in.
“My job at U of M was to make your lives miserable,” Helen said. She paused and kneaded her large-knuckled nascently arthritic hands. “It wasn’t my job to make my Focus’s life miserable, and for that I apologize.” Helen sighed. “I’m too old to change quickly, I’m afraid.”
“You’re not old,” Gail said. She blushed, quick memories of Helen and her husband Roger’s favorite pastime, sex, flashing through her mind. She and Van had never had so much fun, even before she transformed into a Focus. She was half-jealous.
Helen licked her lips, now staring at the tent canvas. “Let’s not speak about the rumors our fellow Transforms spread,” she said. Gail turned beet red. Her metasense capabilities had long since made it into the household rumor mill. Helen paused for a moment and glanced at Gail, and shook her head. “I do want to help. Tell me.”
Gail pushed her mind back to her planned conversation. “You’re one of my Focus attendants, an indefinably special Transform, according to the literature I’ve been dredging up.” All thanks to Van, Sylvie, Kurt and Melanie. “I need to know more about you, if you don’t mind, because, in the long run, I think we need to work together.”
For a second, Helen smiled a grin that reminded Gail of a dog about to chase a rabbit, or a housecat about to pounce on a baby bird. “What do you want to know?”
“How did you get to be so forceful, Helen?” Gail said. Yes, she and Sylvie had gamed this out ahead of time, but, still… “If I could learn how you do it, I could be a better Focus.” Take control of her household without using her appalling Focus tricks.
“Years. Life,” Helen said. She relaxed, and her eyes softened, as she relived memories. She shifted in her chair and it settled another inch into the mud. “I graduated from Purdue University in 1938 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.” Gail almost fell off the cot where she sat. A woman in 1938, not only graduating from college, but with an engineering degree? She did manage to, barely, repress her instinctive urge to stand and shout ‘what!’ “I thought I was going to change the world, and make a difference. Roger and I got married that summer, and he supported the idea that I should work outside of home after I finished having children. The world was different, then: pregnant, I was unemployable. I had Rachel and the twins, Lenore and Lillian, in a couple of years. Then World War II happened. Roger went off to the Army A
ir Corp, and because I was blessed with a spinster older sister, Ivy, willing to watch my daughters, I got a chance to work at Ford, in Willow Run, where I ran four production lines, through their supervisors, making B-24 bombers. I was the only woman at my management level. When the war ended, though, my new bosses transferred me to the secretarial pool. At Ford’s most menial level.” Helen mopped her brow. “I quit, disgusted, and ended up raising my daughters through puberty.” She smiled a bitter smile. “Who have all disowned Roger and me because of my transformation. C’est la vie. Because of the money I saved during the war, we were well off, and once Lenny and Lilly entered High School, I went back to work, at U of M.”
“Wow,” Gail said. “I had no idea.” Gail wanted, needed, to hear more. “Could you tell me a little about what you did at Ford?” This was priceless and beautiful.
“Focus, Gail…” Helen said, and sighed, a half hour later. Gail held back her comments; Helen’s children were not only nonmembers of the counterculture, but also belonged to the crowd who thought the modern generation ought to be arrested for being themselves. “Why haven’t you taken over? If I was in your shoes, I’d have all us Transforms waiting on your every whim. It’s the obvious right thing to do.”
Gail nodded. “That’s what it seems like from the outside,” she said. “From the inside? Did using slaves instead of free laborers make the plantations stronger or weaker?” How many plantations dotted the world? None. “Did the slavemasters do themselves any favors by taking the easy way out, relying on force majure instead of capitalism?” Can you say ‘economically buried in the dustbin of history’? “Do the drug dealers who sample their own wares turn out better than the ones who don’t?” An addict is an addict, whether they start out rich or poor, or management or peon.
“Drug dealers?”
“Stripping someone below where I accidentally strip people is pleasurable for me, Helen,” Gail said, hunching forward, intently. She hadn’t told Sylvie this one. Yet. Pleasure for her, adding to the dangerous pain she picked up from the victim – confusing, and in her heart, hideously dangerous. She couldn’t see how any Focus who stripped people down on a regular basis could stay sane for long. “As is wielding power for the sake of wielding power. How long can any of us stay uncorrupted by power, if we have to survive by wielding pleasurable power?” Damn. She even sounded like Van. Yes, she needed to expand her inner circle.
Helen frowned. “Interesting,” she said, uneasy.
“It’s subtle.” Gail still occasionally wondered if she was imagining things, if she had just fallen prey to the confirmation bias, the bane of the true professional journalist. “No matter. I’m not going to do such things, unless I’m forced.”
Helen nodded and wiped her brow again. From the next tent over, Gail listened to the sound of the youngest Carlow boy arguing with his mother as Helen thought. “You want something,” Helen said, after a moment. “Just ask. You’re my Focus. Whatever I can do, I will.”
Gail turned away. Not only didn’t she deserve this, if she gave in to these protestations too often, she would end up on a pedestal, doing wrong and taking advantage. She needed her other two Focus attendants, though. “Two things. The first, well…” She still found asking embarrassing. “I’d like your support for something harsh I’m thinking I need to do, to fix my status here in my household.”
“I’ll help. No problem,” Helen said. Her almost anticipatory look turned predatory. “What else?”
“Uh, uh, well, I figured after I talked to you, because you’re one of my attendants, something obvious to me would show up,” Gail said. Kurt believed she would need to learn how to find people’s strengths and use them, if she was going to succeed as a Focus. She hadn’t believed doing any such thing would be easy or obvious, but talking to Helen did give her ideas. “I’ve got something. Helen, you’re our house scientist.”
Helen blinked. “Excuse me?”
“You’re the only college graduate Transform in the household with a science degree, or even a science major.”
“My degree’s nearly thirty years out of date!” Helen said. “My husband, Roger, has a Masters in…”
Gail nodded. “Have him help you, of course, but, well, after the mess with Virgil, I find I don’t trust the non-Transforms as much as I used to.” At least Roger was married, and not looking elsewhere, as was David Carlow, husband of Gretchen, one of Gail’s other Transforms.
Helen closed her eyes for a moment of thought. “I’ll do it,” she said. “Where do you need me to start?”
“I’ve got just the place,” Gail said. She went over to Van’s old ratty cedar chest, opened it, and took out the notes and copies she had already looked through. “I’ve got people doing research on all things Transform. In secret.” Bart thought her research was a waste of household resources. In his mind, sitting around in a hot tent and doing nothing was measurably better. “I want you to help, and in the long run, I want you to take over the research.”
“I’ll have to relearn my chemistry,” Helen said. Her voice lowered to a mutter. “I didn’t even take biochemistry. Way too hard for me.”
“You’ll do fine,” Gail said, shivering at her memories of her minor exposure to chemistry of any form. Too many compounds with the same starting letter soon looked alike to her. The rest was worse. “Especially compared to the rest of us.”
Helen stood up to leave, but Gail stopped her with one more question, unable to resist her curiosity. “Why?” she asked.
Helen raised her eyebrows.
“Why are you so willing to help me?” Gail said, still remembering the witch bitch Grimm, deflating student hopes and dreams as they came into her office.
Helen sat back down in her chair. “I don’t respect fools, Focus. Gail,” she said, answering Gail’s real question. “I don’t respect slackers who keep trying for the easy way around their problems. Who can’t be bothered to work, or think. There are too many slackers in the world, and the earlier they figure out their life-strategy doesn’t work, the better off they’ll be. I have a lot of respect for a person who tackles a hard job and puts in the work and thought to do it right.”
Gail blinked, processing the implied compliment.
“Besides, you can’t do a worse job than the jackasses who are doing it now.” She grimaced. “You’re doing something hard, so you’ll probably mess it up some to start with. Whatever you do, no matter how bad it gets, don’t quit. And don’t let the fools ever convince you to back down.
“You’ll do fine. Eventually.” She nodded at Gail and left, leaving Gail marveling. The witch bitch Grimm. Wow.
---
“…and without unions, we’d all be nothing more than slaves! The unions make us strong!” Lucille, Van’s mother, said the last with a shout. She slammed the door behind her and stalked away from the Ebener farmhouse. Gail, from her position under the Lightning Oak, sighed in frustration. This Lucille tantrum wasn’t going to be a minor one. The posture of Lucille’s stalk reminded Gail far too much of her father, when he stalked out of her and her household’s life. Gail had a bad feeling this would be the last of Van’s family’s visits.
You would think a southeastern Michigan-based household would be pro-Union, but no, not hers. Contrary cusses, the whole lot of them. She had assumed even the band of contrary cusses that constituted her household wouldn’t be able to get to Lucille for real, but, well…wrong again.
Daisy, sitting near her, snorted awake from her nap. Definitely a lazy summer day, but her entire household heard the clock of winter ticking, and Gail often metasensed the panic starting to build in her Transforms. Daisy had come with her parents, but Abby had found a way to beg off on this visit. The Perfesser had been far less than his usual ebullient self today as well, quiet and Van-like. The only person he had talked to for more than a word or two had been Van. Had he sensed the problems she and Van were having?
Daisy lit up a cigarette and stretched. “So, do you think your household will be abl
e to use those old stoves?” She must have missed the earlier conversation on the subject, of all things off talking with Kurt, doing some form of heavy business.
“Yes, if we get stuck staying here for the winter,” Gail said. “One of those old stoves ought to be able to keep a tent or a shack warm.” The Perfesser had donated his barn’s entire stash of pot-bellied stoves, ‘good enough for Ben Franklin, good enough for you’, to help them prepare for winter. She had no idea where he had gotten so many of them. Perhaps they bred, like coat hangers.
“Gotta watch out for ventilation problems, though,” Daisy said. “If they don’t draw right, they’ll kill you with carbon monoxide.”
Right. She hoped someone in the household understood the problem, as she suspected the Schubers weren’t likely to be making any more trips down here.
“So, Daisy, how goes things?” Gail knew the younger woman was sitting on something important.
Daisy sighed and took a deep drag. “I’m in. I accepted Cal Tech’s offer. I leave in a little more than a week.”
“Hot damn!” Gail said. They must have done the paperwork for Daisy. Bully for them. “Congratulations.”
“Uh huh. I may have bit off more than I can chew, though,” Daisy said. “After I accepted the offer, I talked for a couple hours to a woman counselor there.”
“Two hours?”
“Uh huh. I was surprised they even have women counselors, but there’ve been enough problems integrating women into that place, that they apparently need her.”
Ouch. “I hear a problem,” Gail said. Daisy was definitely out of sorts, conflicted and, if Gail read her correctly, scared. She made a move to pat Daisy’s arm, before remembering Daisy’s hot horny eyeballs from Daisy’s first visit to the household. Gail yanked her hand back and her face flushed. Ever since she first got to U of M, she had realized how uncomfortable she got around people who were different from her. Worse, it made her feel guilty, which didn’t help one bit.
No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) Page 16