'I'm not tired.'

'Well, it's not good to go too long on nervous excitement. I put your toothbrush out, and your Aunt Holly put out a washcloth and a towel for you. Do you remember which bedroom -?'

'Yeah, sure. You going to bed, Mom?'

'Soon. I'm going to sit up with Holly for a while. We've got a lot of history to catch up on, she and V

Shyly, Brett said, 'She looks like you. Y'know that?'

Charity looked at him, surprised. 'Does she? Yes, I suppose she does. A little.'

'And that little kid, Jimmy. He's got a real right hook. Pow!' Brett burst out laughing.

'Did he hurt your stomach?'

'Heck, no.' Brett was looking around Jim's study carefully, noting the Underwood typewriter on the desk, the Rolodex, the neat open file of folders with the names on the tabs in alphabetical order.

There was a careful, measuring look in his eyes that she couldn't understand or evaluate. He seemed to come back from far away.

'Nah, he didn't hurt me. He's just a Iittle kid.' He cocked his head at her. 'My cousin, right?'

'Right.'

'Blood relation.' He seemed to muse over it.

‘Brett, do you like your Uncle Jim and Aunt Holly?'

I like her. I can't tell about him yet. That jukebox. That's really neat. But He shook his head in a kind of impatience.

'What about it, Brett?'

'He takes so much pride in it!' Brett said. 'It was the first thing he showed me, like a kid with a toy, isn't this neat, you know -'

'Well, he's only had it for a little while,' Charity said. An unformed dread had begun to swirl around inside of her, connected somehow with Joe - what had he told Brett when he took him out on the sidewalk? 'Anyone's partial to Something new. Holly wrote me when they finally got it, said Jim had wanted one of those things since he was a young man. People ... honey, different people buy different things to ... to show themselves that they're successful, I suppose. There's no accounting for it. But usually it's something they couldn't have when they were poor.'

'Was Uncle Jim poor?'

'I really don't know,' she said. 'But they're not poor now.'

'All I meant was that he didn't have anything to do with it. You get what I mean?' He looked at her closely. 'He bought it with money and hired some people to fix it and hired some more people to bring it here, and he says it's his, but he didn't ... you know, he didn't ... aw, I don't know.'

'He didn't make it with his own hands?' Although her fear was greater now, more coalesced, her voice was gentle.

'Yeah! That's right! He bought it with money, but he didn't really have nothing to do

‘Anything -'

'Okay, yeah, anything to do with it, but now he's, like, takin credit for it -~

'He said a jukebox is a delicate, complicated machine

'Dad could have gotten it running,' Brett said flatly, and Charity thought she heard a door bang shut suddenly, closing with a loud, toneless, frightening bang. It wasn't in the house. It was in her heart. 'Dad would have tinkered it up and it would have been his.'

'Brett,' she said (and her voice sounded weak and justifying to her own ears), 'not everybody is good at tinkering and fixing like your father is.'

'I know that,' he said, still looking around the office. 'Yeah. But Uncle Jim shouldn't take credit for it just because he had the money. See? It's him taking the credit that I don't h -that bothers me.'

She was suddenly furious with him. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him back and forth; to raise her voice until it was loud enough to shout the truth into his brain. That money did not come by accident; that it almost always resulted from some sustained act of will, and that will was the core of character. She would tell him that while his father was perfecting his skills as a

tinkerer and swilling down Black Label with the rest of the boys in the back of Emerson's Sunoco, sitting in piles of dead bald tires and telling frenchman jokes, Jim Brooks had been in law school, knocking his brains out to make grades, because when you made the grades you got the diploma, and the diploma was your ticket, you got to ride the merry-go-round. Getting on didn't mean you'd catch the brass ring, no, but it guaranteed you the chance to at least try.

'You go on up now and get ready for bed,' she said quietly. 'What you think of your Uncle Jim is between you and you. But ... give him a chance, Brett. Don't just judge him on that.' They had gone through into the family room now, and she jerked a thumb at the jukebox.

'No, I won't,' he said.

She followed him up into the kitchen, where Holly was making cocoa for the four of them. Jim junior and Gretchen had gone to bed long before.

'You get your man?' Holly asked.

'No, he's probably down chewing the fat with that friend of his,'

Charity said. 'We'll try tomorrow.'

'Want some cocoa, Brett?' Holly asked.

'Yes, please.'

Charity watched him sit down at the table. She saw him put his elbow on it and then take it off again quickly, remembering that it was impolite. Her heart was so full of love and hope and fear that it seemed to stagger in her chest.

Time, she thought. Time and perspective. Give him that. If you force him, you'll lose him for sure.

But how much time was there? Only a week, and then he would be back under Joe's influence. And even as she sat down next to her son and thanked Holly for her cup of hot cocoa, her thoughts had turned speculatively to the idea of divorce again.

In her dream, Vic had come.

He simply walked down the driveway to the Pinto and opened her door. He was dressed in his best suit, the three-piece charcoal-gray one (when he put it on she always teased him that he looked like Jerry Ford with hair). Come on, you two, he said, and that quirky little grin was on his face. Time to go home before the vampires come out.

She tried to warn him, to tell him the dog was rabid, but no words came. And suddenly Cujo was advancing out of the dark, his head down, a steady low growl rumbling in his chest. Watch out! she tried to cry. His bite is death I But no sound came out.

But just before Cujo launched himself at Vic, he turned and pointed his finger at the dog. Cujo's fur went dead white instantly.

His red, rheumy eyes dropped back into his head like marbles into a cup. His muzzle fell off and shattered against the crushed gravel of the driveway like black glass. A moment later all that was left in front of the garage was a blowing fur coat.

Don't you worry, Vic said in a dream. Don't you worry about that old dog, it's nothing but a fur coat. Did you get the mail yet? Never mind the dog, the mail's coming. The mail's the important thing.

Right? The mail

His voice was disappearing down a long tunnel, growing echoey and faint. And suddenly it was not a dream of Vic's voice but a memory of a dream - she was awake and her cheeks were wet with tears. She had cried in her sleep. She looked at her watch and could just make out the time: quarter past one. She looked over at Tad