A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker Page A

gone into her house? It would be cloudy soon. She wouldn’t stay out when it was cloudy.
    Halfway down the stairs, Owen heard the baby howl. Would he have to stay in now? To help out? He pulled the string on the overhead bulb, poked around in the cardboard boxes in the corner, considering the possibility of mice, spiders. Thefloor creaked under his mother’s weight above him, under the weight of the baby. He’d held it once. It weighed a lot, for something that size.
    At the bottom of the second box, he found an old Pepsi-Cola tray, probably from the bar, too. It reminded him of last winter, when he’d had the flu. He’d spent nearly a week stretched out on the chesterfield in the front room, reading comic books while his mother brought him glass after glass of flat ginger ale on that tray. That had been a good week, in spite of the flu. Owen closed the box and headed for the stairs. As always when leaving the basement, he kept the light on, unwilling to turn his back on a darkened room.
    Owen eased himself across the wall. Lucy had rolled onto her stomach and leaned on one elbow, looking at the Sears catalogue, her swimsuit straps dangling down over the pinkish tops of her arms.
    “About time.” Her face looked red and swollen from the heat. “What are you wearing those pants for? Aren’t you godawful hot?”
    He set the tray down carefully on the grass. She took one of the mugs and flipped a page in the catalogue. When he didn’t answer, she looked up at him. “What you got to wear pants for?”
    “Skin cancer,” he said, before he could stop himself.
    “You got skin cancer?”
    He rubbed his palms on his pants. “Maybe.”
    “That’ll kill ya, you know.”
    “I know.”
    She let the catalogue fall shut.
    “I had a cousin died last summer,” she said. “Brainaneurysm. Popped off in the middle of the night and nobody knew nothing about it. Ten years old. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Found her in the morning and it looked like she was sleeping.” Lucy took a bite of graham cracker and added ominously, “Only she wasn’t.” She paused to brush crumbs from her lips. “Maybe you got a brain aneurysm.”
    “No,” he said, “I don’t.”
    “You better hope not.” She reached for another cracker. “You better hope it’s not a brain aneurysm. They get you in your sleep. Just like that. You might have one. You wouldn’t know it if you did, and then one night—” She snapped her fingers again.
    “I don’t have an aneurysm,” Owen said irritably, poking at the ice cubes in his glass.
    “How do you know?”
    “My mom would know. She’d know.”
    “She’d know it when she found you laid out stone-cold dead in the morning, that’s what.” Lucy finished the crackers and closed her eyes, resting her head on her folded arms. Owen could see fine bits of graham cracker stuck to the sweat above her lip.
    His mother would know. Of course she would. Even with the baby. She’d know. He thought about what she’d said as he was leaving: “You tell that Lucy Satterley—” Then she’d shaken her head, jiggled the baby against her chest. “Remind Lucy her mother has my good baking pan.” She wouldn’t let something like that happen to him, something like an aneurysm. But he did not want to talk to Lucy about his mother. He did not want to talk about her at all. He thought of what they said sometimes at school, chanting it during recess but quietly so the teachers wouldn’t hear,
Lillie Gower ain’t no flower.
It was stupid. And it wasn’t the worst thing they said, not by far. But it made him angry anyway. Lucy would never say that. Or would she?
    He looked up at the sky, at the fat clouds moving heavily. Soon they would be right overtop of them.
    “My mom wants her baking pan,” he blurted.
    “What?”
    “My mom wants her baking pan.”
    “Right now?”
    “Yes.” He stuck out his chin. “She’s baking a cake.” He sat up straight and added, “Not for the