She looked at him helplessly.
Brett Camber put the phone down slowly. 'No one answered. He's not home, I guess.'
Charity nodded, not terribly surprised. She was glad that Jim had suggested they make the call from his office, which was downstairs and off the 'family room'. The family room was soundproofed. There were shelves of board games in there, a Panasonic large-screen TV with a video recorder and an Atari
video-games setup attached to it. And standing m one corner was a lovely old Wurlitzer jukebox that really worked.
'Down at Gary's, I guess,' Brett added disconsolately.
'Yes, I imagine he's with Gary,' she agreed, which wasn't exactly the same as saying they were together at Gary's house. She had seen the faraway look that had come into Joe's eyes when she had finally struck the deal with him, the deal that had gotten her and her son down here. She hoped Brett wouldn't think of calling directory assistance for Gary Pervier's number, because she doubted if there would he any answer there either. She suspected that there were two old dogs out somewhere tonight howling at the moon.
'Do you think Cuje is okay, Mom?'
'Why, I don't think your father would go off and leave him if he wasn't, she said, and that was true - she didn't believe he would
'Why don't we leave it for tonight and you call him in the morning?
You ought to be getting to bed anyway. It's past ten. You've had a big day.'
'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