The Nobodies

  Hazel knew she ought to pull the bell cord and get off at the next stop.  The gray weatherbeaten storefront of Putnam Avenue Market must have flashed by the smudgy bus window as she'd been looking down, fooling with her Ipod.  Just as little Jane Eyre climbed up on the punishment stool to be chastised by Mr. Brocklehurst, the volume had dropped abruptly to nothing, and while Hazel was checking the headphone cord and the battery light, her bus stop had evidently  gone by.  Then she'd also missed the last stop before the bridge, and now Hazel's bus sat in traffic over the railroad switching yard.  Under the bridge, curved rails swarmed over and under, dotted with rusty tank cars in broken chains of two or three.

Hazel watched three men in Carhartt coveralls stoop, each in turn, to look at the underside of a cylindrical tank car marked DANGER -- FLAMMABLE.  Hazel bet something was leaking under there, and she considered whether the tanker would explode, and if so, whether the explosion would take out the bridge and the #53 Longbridge/Hunter bus.

"I'd be in paragraph five," thought Hazel, picturing newsprint phrases like "until all victims were identified" and "released after notification of relatives." She'd be in the middle of a list of names and ages: Hazel Duckworth, 51.

The next day, Hazel's life would be summarized in three lines buried in the newspaper's funeral section. Visiting hours  from 5 to 7 pm at Mehlman Memory Chapel.  Mentions of son Steven of Lake Forest, IL, daughter Marcia of Missoula, MT, and brother Frederick of Portsmouth, OH.

There would be no mention of The Duckworth Review, because all eleven issues of the Review were still in longhand form in spiral notebooks stacked in a cardboard box on top of Hazel's entertainment center.  After Hazel's funeral, her brother Fred would take the box out to the dumpster at the back of the cracked-asphalt parking lot behind the apartment complex, and no one would ever read Hazel's review of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, or her thoughts on why June Allyson would have been a better Jo than Katharine Hepburn in the 1933 film.

The three men in tan Carhartt coveralls were all talking at the same time, but they were all nodding too, which Hazel interpreted as enthusiastic agreement rather than argument.  The man with the grayest hair, who might have been the supervisor, stepped back, stopped talking and pointed to something Hazel couldn't see.  He raised his eyebrows and waited.  The other two coveralled men both made thinking faces and then both said "Yeah" at the same time.  The three men turned and moved away from the tank car, disappearing under the edge of the overpass.

Thus the railroad car did not explode, and the idling bus roared to life.  Hazel rang the bell as the #53 moved to the left-turn lane and swung itself, farting clouds of gray-black fog, into Hemphill Street traffic. Hazel released the bell cord, picked up her lunch sack, and looped the handle of her bag over her right shoulder.  She stood and reached up to grab the smudgy metal of the overhead grab bar.

The driver, irritated at having to stop so soon after the turn, tried to throw Hazel into the back door well by slamming to a stop but Hazel was wise to all the bus driver tricks and had her feet well braced on the rubber mat.  The green light over the door glowed and Hazel slammed the back doors open and vaulted to the curb before the black cloud of hot exhaust could snort all over her.

She was late to work, of course,  because she had to walk back across the bridge (the coveralled men were now on the other side of the bridge, telling jokes and laughing), and then back another six blocks to Putnam Avenue, and then two blocks to the corner of Putnam and Chess.  She crossed the enormous parking lot and then quietly opened the side door of the green warehouse and stepped inside.

Hazel hurriedly found her locker with the battered metal door, stuffed her jacket, sack lunch, and shoulder bag into it, and looked around to see if anyone noticed or cared that she was late.  No.  As usual, no one knew she was alive.  She could tumble into the locker and accidentally jam the rust-blotched door behind herself and then pound for an hour, screaming "Let me out!" and all that would happen would be that she'd be stuck, sweaty-haired, in a steel prison with a shortage of fresh air.  Yelling and banging might make a passerby curious, eventually.  Maybe.

Hazel did manage to store her belongings and shut the beat-up, bent locker door quietly without actually falling inside the locker, and she took a winding path to the time clock, moving around another bank of lockers and behind some metal utility shelving.

Next to the time clock, there was a metal rack filled with narrow slits each labeled with a name, and in each slit sat a tall skinny yellow time card.  Hazel ran her finger down to the D's, then pulled out the tall yellow card marked Duckworth, H. She slid the card into the clock, wiggling it back and forth as the clock went ca-chunk.  Hazel pulled the card out of the clock and inspected the inky time stamp. She could still, with effort, read the time as 9:21. Hazel reinserted the card, put a second stamp over the first, and then checked again. Now the time stamp was completely illegible. She searched the cluttered, dirty gray steel desk until she found a plastic cup with a pencil in it, then circled the time stamp and penciled in the time 9:00 and a set of three initials, which didn’t match any of the supervisors’ names. As she dropped the long yellow card back into the D slot, someone approached from the right and Hazel jumped, then sighed in resignation. Late, caught, fired

“Hi,” said her friend Samuel.  Hazel recovered, and tried to pay attention to what Samuel was saying.

Samuel's square face, under his tousled graying hair, was aglow.  “Guess what? The new calendars came in a couple days early!” He held out a shrink-wrapped wall calendar with a large cover photo of a shiny black insect with scary-looking hooked pincers. Above the photo, the calendar said “Beetle World No. 6.”

“Wow!” Hazel said, starting to hand the calendar back. Samuel didn’t reach for it. “Oh, cool, this one’s mine?” Samuel nodded, pleased.

“Maybe I’d better put it in my locker,” said Hazel. “I forgot my vest, anyway.” She waited to see if Samuel would mention her lateness, but either he hadn’t noticed or his mind was on the beetle calendar.

On the way to Hazel’s locker, they saw Roger, a sharp-faced supervisor in a white shirt and skinny tie, who said ’’Vest” to Hazel over his shoulder as he passed them.

“On my way to get it,” Hazel said over her shoulder.

At the locker, Hazel carefully stored the insect calendar along the left wall, propped up by her lunch sack, protecting it from bumps and bends. “You must be so excited!” she said over her shoulder to Samuel as she slipped on her blue work vest and shut the locker door.

“It works out well that the printer got them done early,” said Samuel. “I can get the college bookstore orders packaged up over the weekend.”

“How many did you get printed?” Hazel asked, as they walked to a row of utility carts lined up side by side. She took hold of the handle of the nearest cart and backed it out into the warehouse aisle.  Samuel followed her. The wheels rattled and jittered as Hazel piloted the cart to a row marked 1 IE West.  She parked the cart close to the right-hand shelves and took a clipboard off a chrome hook on the side of the cart.  “You want to count or mark?” she asked Samuel.

“Mark,” he said, taking the clipboard and slipping the pencil free from the metal clip. “I cut back to five hundred calendars this time,” he sasid. “Last time I did a thousand, and I still have two hundred, plus I got about a hundred music returns and another sixty or so on the VW thing.”

“If people can understand how to buy stuff over the Internet,” Hazel said, opening the top flaps of a white cardboard carton, “and the description says 'Beetle World,' why don’t they notice if it's entomology, or British Invasion, or compact car?” Hazel paused to count. “Okay, partial carton. Five 24-count Wick-It.”

As Samuel made a pencil note, he was jostled by Big Pete, who passed by with a cart loaded high with boxes. “Bug Boy, you need to move out of the aisle when you mark.”

“Don’t call him that,” said Hazel, not looking at Big Pete.

“Hey, he didn’t put his name on his vest, so I forget,” said Big Pete, nodding toward the white badgeshaped patch on the left side of Samuel’s vest. Above the patch, red embroidery letters said “L. H. Jenkins Medical Supply,” but the patch itself was empty.

Big Pete looked at the empty name patch on Hazel’s vest. “You don’t have yours done, either,
Hazard,” said Big Pete. “Or should I say Hazardous Waste?” He began rolling his loaded cart down the aisle, whistling.

Samuel stared at Big Pete’s moving-away back, shifting his jaw back and forth. He looked like he wanted to inflict a painful bite on Big Pete’s arm. Hazel guessed when you spent a lot of time in Beetle World, a threat from a predator made your mouth parts want to clamp on and hold.

“I hate that guy,” said Samuel.

“I know,” said Hazel. “Me too.” She pictured Big Pete’s utility cart throwing itself into reverse suddenly, leaving Big Pete a two-dimensional cartoon pancake on the shiny terrazzo floor. Maybe she and Samuel would peel him up and wibble-wobble him back into shape, or maybe they’d just leave him pasted to the floor like a cereal ad in the grocery aisle.

She moved to the right and looked at the label on a brown cardboard carton. “Okay, there’s three, no - four - full cartons of Accu-Trol Test Strips, the blue ones.”

“48 box count?” asked Samuel, flipping through his clipboard sheets.

“Yep,” said Hazel.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you,” said Samuel, writing the number 4 in a box on the third sheet and letting the pages flip down again. “The editor of Coleoptological Quarterly asked me if I had good color photos of cereal leaf beetles.”

“Why?” asked Hazel, standing on tiptoe to look at the top shelf. “Are they pretty?”

“Oh yeah,” said Samuel. “They have red legs and like a red collar, and their bodies are shiny blue, like a new Schwinn bicycle. I put a cereal-leaf in Beetle World Number 3. I used it for May, because they like to eat fresh new growing leaves.”

Hazel had never seen any of the inside pictures in calendars 1 through 6, because she found beetles pretty creepy, though not as bad as spiders. She kept all her Beetle Worlds in their original shrink wrap, in an accordion file marked Taxes 1995. She told Samuel that she wanted to save them as she felt they’d be valuable someday, like rare comic books.

The hours before lunch crawled by but it was finally 11:30.  Hazel and Samuel left their half-filled cart parked in Aisle 1 IE West and headed for the lockers. Hazel grabbed her lunch sack and a half-empty pack of Kools and shot out the side door to stake out a good spot for herself and Samuel on the brick wall that edged the parking lot. She had just settled her rear comfortably on the sun-warmed brick when Samuel drifted out from the warehouse building, with a blue soft mini-cooler on a strap over his left shoulder. Hazel opened her sack lunch and peered in, hoping that elves had replaced her food with something much nicer. But sadly, the same stuff she’d put in was still there: a peanut butter and banana sandwich, with overripe banana bulging out and sticking to the baggie; a bag of ranch-flavor tortilla chips -- or chiplets, as the lunch sack had been interacting with a hardcover edition of Pride and Prejudice; a doughy chocolate chip cookie bought at a charity bake sale.

Hazel tried not to look as Samuel unzipped his soft lunch carrier and took out a small oval porcelain dish with a rubber lid. As Samuel pulled the lid away from the dish, a delicious aroma forced Hazel to peek at Samuel’s savory lunch. “Salisbury steak and a mushroom tartlet,” said Samuel, handing Hazel the dish and an ornate silver fork. “Don’t lose my fork.”

“I can’t eat your -- “ Hazel began, but Samuel smiled at her and removed an identical dish from the bottom of the hot/cold bag.

“This is fabulous,” said Hazel, savoring a bite of flaky tartlet crust. I don’t know how you do it.”

“One Sunday a month, I cook up a bunch of stuff and put it in freezer bags,” said Samuel. “When my mom passed away, I got her big freezer. I can fit about a hundred lunches” -- Samuel indicated his oval dish -- “on the shelves, plus another ten or twelve in the door.”

They finished their food, and Samuel stored the dishes away neatly in his zippered soft case. Hazel lit a Kool and handed it to Samuel before lighting one for herself. They pretended to smoke. Samuel had never been a smoker, and Hazel had quit years ago. She still enjoyed the familiar smell of the smoke as it drifted past her, but Samuel didn’t like the smell getting on his hands and clothes. But they both liked to eat lunch outside, sitting on the brick wall, and as long as they held it cigarettes like the other people who came outside to eat and smoke, they could avoid the fluorescent-lit, crowded lunchroom without seeming stuck-up.

But finally they got down to the filters and had to stub out their Kools on the soles of their shoes. Hazel looked up after a big door slam from the parking lot. Big Pete had dismounted from his double-cab pickup and was cramming the last of a cheeseburger into his mouth. He strode toward the warehouse door, wadding up the burger wrapper, and he pretended to throw the wad into Samuel’s face. He laughed when Samuel flinched, and then tossed the wrapper in an arc over Hazel’s head into a metal trash can before banging the warehouse door open and disappearing inside.

“One speck of poison from a Choresine beetle is two hundred times more potent than strychnine,” said Samuel thoughtfully.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Hazel, standing up and tossing her Kool butt into the metal trash can. “Even if you could get him to eat a poisoned tartlet, it’s not going to take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who had rare beetle toxin right at hand. You’d be in Alcatraz slam-bang.”

“Alcatraz closed in 1963,” said Samuel. “Too bad.” He opened the warehouse door for Hazel. “I could have been the Beetle Man of Alcatraz, with a trained beetle circus and rare specimens in little cages all over my cell.” He let the door shut behind them, and the bright sunshine was squeezed to a narrow slit, then was gone.


 ***


On the bus ride home, Hazel couldn’t get her iPod going so she abandoned her audiobook Jane Eyre and switched to the library book in her shoulder bag. She flipped to page 61 of Pride and Prejudice and found a folded page of penciled notes she'd tucked between the pages.

The rest of the way home, she read and made an occasional scribbly note on the creased paper, and she was on page 84 when her bus stop was coming up. Stuffing everything in her bag, she pulled the bell cord and exited by the back door.  The bus stop was at the edge of the trash-littered parking lot of her apartment building.  She cut across the asphalt lot and went in the east entrance.   In the lobby, she unlocked and checked her skinny metal mail mailbox.  Hers was easy to find since it was one of the few which wasn’t dented in or doorless. She peeked inside, but the mailbox was empty except for a pizza flyer and a notice to renew her library card.  What had she been expecting?  A letter from the Nobel Prize committee?

Inside her apartment, Hazel stopped to feed the tropical fish and saw that the tank light was out. She flicked the fluorescent tube with her fingernail and the light buzzed on, bringing the leafy ferny plants out of the darkness. The smallest fish were surprised by the light and fled into the protective branches of the water plants.

Hazel took her shoulder bag to the card table set up as a desk in a comer of the living room. She unloaded the iPod and headphones, the copy of Pride and Prejudice with the folded notes stuck between the pages, and the birthday cards she’d meant to send to her son and daughter, who shared a birthday in a day or two. On her way to put the cards into the mailbox outside her building, she stopped in the kitchen long enough to put the paper bag full of uneaten lunch into the wastebasket.

Hazel came back from the mailbox, locking both deadbolts on the front door and went to the refrigerator, where half a plate of Mexican take-out food, covered in Saran Wrap, sat on the bottom shelf. Hazel peeled the plastic off, popped a microwave cover over the plate, and heated her dinner at 80 percent power for four minutes. While the microwave hummed, she cleared a work space on the card table in the living room and set out Pride and Prejudice, the sheet of handwritten notes, and a spiral notebook which had the Roman number XI written on the cover with laundry marker.
The microwave beeped, and Hazel brought her plate to the card table and set it to the left of Pride and Prejudice. The food was steaming, much too hot to put on Hazel’s tender tongue, so she leaned over to get the cordless phone from the middle sofa cushion, and hit the speed-dial button for her son’s number.

“Hi, this is Steven,” said her son’s recorded voice. “Janet and I are out at the moment. To leave a message for Janet, push pound-one. For Steven, push pound-two.” There was a long beep tone as Hazel hit the pound key, then the 2 key. “Hi, honey,” she said into the receiver. “I forgot to mail your
card and check, so they’ll get there late. Happy birthday, and I hope you and your sister will get to talk. Give my love to Janet.” Hazel beeped the phone off and tossed it back onto the sofa cushion, and began to eat dinner.

She had nearly finished, and gotten to page 132 of Pride and Prejudice, when the phone trilled and she leaned over to grab it.

“Hi Mom,” said Marcia.

“Hi sweetie,” said Hazel. “I just left a message for your brother. I forgot to mail your card and check till just now."

“Oh, you didn’t need to send me anything," Marcia began.

“That’s what a mother is for,” said Hazel firmly. “I was getting ready to call you - this is your night to close the store, isn’t it?”

“Usually,” said Marcia. “But I wanted my birthday off, so Shelley and I flip-flopped schedules.”

Loud music began pounding through the west wall of Hazel’s apartment and she had a little trouble hearing Marcia. “That’s nice,” she said, putting her hand over her free ear. “What are you going to do tomorrow?”

“Shop,” said Marcia, laughing. “Susan’s taking me out in the morning to get some clothes, and then we’re having lunch at the Rotisserie. Susan doesn’t know it, but after lunch I want to go to Pantello’s and look at purses.”

At Hazel's end, there was a loud bang out in the parking lot and Marcia asked in an alarmed voice, “Are they shooting over there? Do you need the police?”

“No, no, just somebody’s car backfiring,” said Hazel, leaning over to pull back the curtain edge to make sure.

“I wish you’d come stay with us,” said Marcia. “I don’t think those apartments are safe. There’s some creepy-looking people."

“My building’s good,” said Hazel. “Very safe. I know everybody on this side, and the door's got a double deadbolt, honey. The landlord’s nephew drives around and looks for problems. Nobody’s going to bother us over here. Nobody on this side has anything to take.”

"We have the whole upstairs you could have,” said Marcia. “There’s a full bathroom with a tub and shower, and we could put in a little kitchenette if you --"

“Oh, you don’t want your mama underfoot all the time,” said Hazel. “I need to be near the bus line to work, and the rent’s very reasonable here. Listen, sweetie, I don’t want to run the phone bill up so I’ll just say happy birthday and I hope you have fun tomorrow. You’ll get the card in a couple days --1'll drop it in the mailbox in the morning."

"Okay, then," said Marcia, "Thanks for calling, and I love you."

"Love you back," said Hazel, "Bye-bye, sweetie," She beeped the phone off and tossed it at the couch cushion where it bounced once and tumbled to the carpet. Pushing her dinner plate aside, Hazel opened the spiral notebook labeled XI and flipped to the first clean page. She picked up a felt-tip pen.

"Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. This book’s events take place in small English towns in the southern third of England in 1812. The best film version of the book remains the 1940 classic starring Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet and Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy, though the 1998 television mini-series co-produced by the BBC is also very good. The 1940 film’s advantage may be the casting of Edna May Oliver as Lady Catherine de Bourgh - remember her as Aunt March in Little Women or Aunt Betsey Trotwood in. David Copperfield?"

Hazel stopped, rubbed her forehead, put the cap back on the felt-tip pen. She closed the cover of the spiral notebook, and put the page of notes on top of it, and Pride and Prejudice on top of that. She picked up her plate and took it to the kitchen sink, rinsed it, and set it, water-beaded and oily, on the counter and clicked off the kitchen light.

The next morning Hazel took the early bus, which came twenty minutes before her usual one, just to make sure she got to work on time. This meant she had to eat her breakfast during the ride, but since she sat near the back, and had taken the strawberry breakfast bar out of its crinkly wrapper, she could snatch quick bites behind the open covers of Pride and Prejudice. The bus driver might have seen her eating, but compared to what some of the passengers did, Hazel's crime was small potatoes.

Last winter, Hazel had sat two seats behind an ugly Incident in which an older drunk man had yelled at a skinny teenage boy who wore a black skullcap with a sheer black neck cloth. The youth had three earrings in his left ear, and these seemed to be what the old drunk guy was yelling about.  The old man's bony finger poked the young man in the shoulder twice, hard, then made a grab for the silver ring inserted through the youth’s earlobe. Quickly, the victim lifted a marble chessboard he’d been holding in his lap, and smacked the old man in the head with it. The bus driver had pulled over to the side of the road, and Hazel had been forced to fill out a little white witness card with her name, phone number and address. She'd been late to work. Big Pete had overheard her explaining to the supervisor, and he’d been tickled to death by the story.

"Chess kung-fu!" he said more than once. "Now that’s the smart move right there. Just crack 'em in the head with the board, now that’s the smart move to make."

Today’s bus trip was violence-free, except for the startling headlines of the newspapers read by the regular commuters. Hazel was thankful that she'd remembered to charge up her iPod. Putting in the earbuds and adjusting the volume, she settled down low in her seat and relaxed as the audiobook's female narrator said, "What a smile! I remember it now, and I know that it was the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage; it lit up her marked lineaments, her thin face, her sunken grey eyes, like a reflection from the aspect of an angel. Yet at that moment Helen Burns wore on her arm 'the untidy badge'. . .

Hazel didn’t need to take notes, since she’d already done Jane Eyre in Volume III of the Duckworth Review, She re-read Jane Eyre every couple of years, alternating it with The Vicar of Wakefield and Tess of the D'Urbervilies, and she enjoyed it more each time. Just as Jane Eyre and Helen Burns were served seed-cake by Miss Temple, Hazel’s stop came up. Fortunately, somebody else had pulled the bell cord and Hazel was able to follow a line of people out the back door as she wound up her earbud cord as she walked up Putnam Avenue toward the warehouse.

At her work locker, Samuel was waiting for her, his blue uniform vest already on.  He had a funny look on his face. Hazel glanced at him, trying to figure out the joke, but she didn’t get it. She opened her locker door, expecting a tumbling shower of ping-pong bails or maybe a yellow smiley-face balloon on a spring, but all she saw was her usual stuff: a red plastic comb, a worn paperback copy of Wuthering Heights, and her own blue work vest. The sight of this triggered a spiit-second visual memory, and Hazel turned to Samuel and inspected his vest. Yes, it was the name patch on Samuel’s vest which had changed. Inside the white rectangle, Samuel had neatly inked the word NOBODY in tidy block letters.

He held out a Sharpie marker, and Hazel hesitated only a moment before she took her vest from her locker, held it against the inside of the open metal door, and adjusted the white badge space so it was on a smooth place. She took the marker from Samuel and wrote "Nobody" in flowing cursive across the light fabric of her name rectangle, then capped the marker and handed it back to Samuel. She slipped her vest on, slammed the locker shut, and said, "I have to go clock in. I can't be late."

At lunchtime, they walked to Taco Bel! where they both got seven-layer burritos, which they took to a table near the back.  On the wall,  a pleated Mexican blanket striped in orange, green-yellow, and teal was attached to the orange plaster wall.

"I have to get somebody out to trim trees," said Samuel, unwrapping his faurnto, "Do you know anybody?"

“There’s that organic landscaping place that advertises on public radio," said Hazel. "I don’t know if they do trees." She took a sip of her Dr. Pepper. "Ooh, this is flat. What did you get?"

"Raspberry iced tea," said Samuel. He took a test sip. "it's fine."

!Tm going to go change this," said Hazel, standing up and lifting the clear lid off her cup. She came back with a cup of raspberry tea and snapped the lid back on, and settled back onto her seat across from Samuel. "Do you have a lot of stuff you have to do to the house?" she asked,

"Yeah, Mom and Dad couldn’t do too much the last four or five years they were there," said Samuel. "Dad’s hip really hurt him quite a bit, and when Mom was alive, he had to run her over to dialysis three times a week."

"How’s the inside of the house?" Hazel picked a strand of wilted lettuce off the soft tortilla wrap and took a bite.

'Tve take six or seven loads of stuff to the Goodwill, and I’ve got to get somebody with a truck to take newspapers to the recycling place. Dad had stacks and stacks of papers in the spare room. I think he was waiting for a Boy Scout paper drive,"

"When was the last time the Boy Scouts came around with Radio Flyer wagons?" asked Hazel, finishing her burrito and taking a sip of iced tea.

"It’s been years," said Samuel. He folded up his wrapper, picking up bits of cheese and rice with his thumb and forefinger and popping them into his mouth. "Once I get all the junk out, it will be a decent house. Kind of big for one person, but 1 can use one of the bedrooms for the calendar project, and I put my beetle specimen cases down in the basement. It’s finished down there, paneling and all that."

As they walked back up Chess Street to the warehouse, Samuel said, "Want to bet how long it will take till somebody notices our vests?"

"At least a month," said Hazel. "Two months. Three? Or never - is that one of my choices? i pick never.”

"Listen, what have you got going on tonight?" said Samuel.

"Just working on the Review," said Hazel. "I’m doing Pride and Prejudice."

"Can you come over and help me get calendars sent out? ! could run you back to your apartment after work if you have things you need to get from home."

"What's on the dinner menu?" Hazel teased, as they turned in at the warehouse parking lot. "If I’m going to spend the evening with all those insects, I need something nice to eat. Are beetles insects? No, it’s spiders that aren’t, right?  Oh, I'm confused." She opened the warehouse door and Samuel followed her inside.

"Rainbow trout grilled with scallions," said Samuel. "Acorn squash, baked.  And pie."

Big Pete was lurking near the doorway, and they didn’t see him till their eyes adjusted. Both Hazel and Samuel jumped. Big Pete-tapped his sports watch. "Djdja have an extra burrito? Or what, didja run into that guy with the chessboard?"

"Let us by, Deputy Dawg," said Samuel, stepping around Big Pete.

Big Pete turned away from Samuel and focused on Hazel, following her as she and Samuel walked to the time clock. Samuel pulled his card and punched in and the dock immediately clicked. "Just made it," said Samuel.

"Don’t worry," Big Pete said to Hazel, "You can just fix your time card like you always do."
Hazel ignored him and tried to step around him to the clock, but he pulled Hazel’s long yellow time card from the slot and waggled it at her.

From behind Big Pete, there was a smail bright flash which reflected off the metal shelving, the time clock. and the corrugated steel walis. Big Pete turned to see Samuel holding a silver cell phone pointed at him. Samuel pushed a button and the camera phone flashed again.

"It's against policy to touch anybody else's time card," said Samuel. "And now I’ve got photos for proof. Plus I believe you’ve tampered with Hazel’s card."

"No, she--" Big Pete began, and lunged for Samuel’s phone, but Samuel snapped it shut and slid it into his pants pocket. "I’d give that time card to the owner," Samuel told Big Pete. "They can get fingerprints off that, you know.”

Big Pete began rubbing the long yellow cardboard card against his shirt sleeve, but Samuel laughed.
"You can’t get fingerprint oil off that way," he said. "Don’t you watch The Cold Case Files?’ Geez.”

Hazel slid around Big Pete and joined Samuel, who had taken the time card from Big Pete. Samuel handed it to Hazel. "Pete will come with us to find a supervisor," he told her, "and explain how he pulled your card by mistake, and you can get signed in on time. Because Pete saw us come in, and we were just barely here on time. Remember?"

Big Pete said nothing, but followed Samuel and Hazel as they looked down-the aisles for Mary, the nicest of the warehouse bosses.


***

In his parents’ out-of-date kitchen, Samuel opened the new George Foreman grill and gently used the flexible spatula to loosen the trout fillets from the teflon ridges below.

"That smells heavenly," said Hazel, peeling an address label from its backing and putting it neatly over the designated label area on the calendar mailer. She set the mailer on the stack to her right, and began to pee! off another label.

'The fish will be ready in a minute," said Samuel. He put the spatula down on a folded paper towel and opened the corroded metal oven door of the old stove. He took out a cookie sheet with two acorn squash halves on it, and set this on the stove top. Picking up a butter dish, he used a table knife to flip a pat of butter into each hot half of the baked squash. "There, these are ready." He reached down to turn the oven off and the black plastic knob came off in his hand. "Shoot." He slid the knob back onto the naked stem and then turned the knob to Off. "No wonder all Mom and Dad ate was cereal and Hot Pockets."

"How much does a new stove cost?" asked Hazel. She labeled another mailer and started a new stack of finished ones.

!i don’t know," said Samuel. He took a plastic salad bowl and a bottle of dressing out of the refrigerator and put them on the scarred formica counter top. "The first thing I have to do is get the tree man to come out and cut off some of these dead branches that are hanging over the roof. If we get a storm, I’m afraid that sycamore is going to punch a hole in the roof."

"Maybe you should let it,” said Hazel. "Then the insurance would pay to trim the tree and also you’d get a new roof. But they won’t buy you a stove no matter what."

"That’s true," said Samuel. "I think if a tree branch comes through the ceiling it would scare me to death, but it might be worth it." He went to the grill and lifted the lid, then lifted off the fish fillets and put them on a bright red platter, "Did you see this Fiesta ware?”

"Didn’t your ex collect it?" said Hazel. She quickly gathered up the stacks of finished mailers and loaded them into two heavy-duty plastic Post Office boxes with handle slots, then stacked the boxes in the corner of the dining room.

"Yep," said Samuel. "The last thing we had to decide about the dissolution was who got the cars and who got the dishes. She took the Toyota because it was newer but it had started blowing out some white exhaust when it started up. So I took the green hatchback-"

"-which is better for going to the Post Office," said Hazel, putting two crocheted placemats on the table.

"Right," said Samuel, "and I got the Fiesta ware since I took the old car. I didn’t used to like it but now it's grown on me. The orange plates are pretty much the same color as the pupal case of Rippodamia convergens."

"An attractive thought," said Hazel, bypassing the orange plates in the dish cabinet and choosing two eggpiant-purple ones.

"Last week Sarah called me to complain that the Toyota had all kinds of fuel and exhaust problems, and I said that when we were still married, I cared about that, but we weren’t married any more."

"Which was her decision,” said Hazel, putting silverware and water glasses on the place mats.

"She’s got our house," said Samuel, bringing the salad bowl to the table. "She has the cat, she has the new boyfriend, and she has the car repair bill. I’ve still been going over to cut the grass since 1 have my dad’s good mower. That’s already nice of me."

"Yep," said Hazel. "Do you want ice in your water?”

"No," said Samuel. "Hurts my teeth. I think I’ve lost a filling."

"Have you thought about getting an equity loan?" said Hazel, sitting down and dishing out fish from the red platter onto Samuel’s purple plate and then her own.

"I don't even know how that works," said Samuel.

’The house is paid off, right?" said Hazel.

"Yes,” said Samuel. "They only paid nineteen thousand for it, and can you believe it took thirty years to pay that off?"

"On what a groundskeeper makes, yeah," said Hazel. "Seasonal work and all that. Your folks probably couldn’t save anything or pay on the principal."

"The bank almost took the house when Mom got sick," said Samuel, handing Hazel the salad bowl. "My folks had-about eight payments to go, and then they got three months behind. A foreclosure notice came in the mail, but my dad got some money from somebody sideswiped his car. Remember when he had that clunker and somebody ran into it in a snowstorm while it was parked in front of the house? It got smashed so bad that Dad got blue book value on it even though the engine and the transmission were shot. The insurance company gave them thirty-two hundred dollars, and that was what they owed on the mortgage. Well, they had to pay some late fees but it pretty much paid it off."

"That worked out,” said Hazel. She took a bite of rainbow trout. "This is so good, Samuel. I don’t know why you work at the medical supply when you could be a hotel chef or something."

"If I didn’t have high blood pressure, ! might look around," said Samuel, forking sorme scallions onto his purple plate. "But I need to be on a group plan. A restaurant or someplace like that doesn't have enough people on the health plan for them to take me. Their premiums would all go up."

"It’s stress," said Hazel. "If you didn’t work at the warehouse, your blood pressure would go down and you could get normal insurance."

"Maybe,” said Samuel. "Oh, it’s all so complicated." He sighed, and poked around in his salad, selecting a bit of tomato and stabbing it with a fork tine. "Science isn't like this. When you study a species, everybody’s working toward the same thing. Even if they don’t like each other, they help each other because the information gets out there."

"Do you want me to help you get some loan offers?" said Hazel, "Want part of my squash?  I can't eat all of it."

"Sure," said Samuel. He held out his purple plate and Hazel pushed a chunk of acorn squash onto it. "You get more than one loan, you mean?"

"No, just one loan,” said Hazel. "But you get two or three banks to make you an offer and then you tell them what Interest rate the other ones are giving you and then you keep knocking the rate down till they won’t lower it any more." Site put her silverware on her purple plate, and carried it to the kitchen. "Why don’t you hunt around and find the deed to the house and any kind of bank statements you have, and we’ll figure out how much money you need to get a stove and go to the dentist and get the tree trimmed and whatnot."

"That would be great," said Samuel, "i’ll have to bake you a cake or something."

"I like cake," said Hazel. "I especially like Black Forest cake.”

"What about pie?" said Samuel.  "We've got lemon meringue tonight."

"Delish!" said Hazel.

***






The following Monday morning, Hazel and Samuel, in Aisle 22F East, were checking expiration dates on cases of Ensure when Mary, the nicest supervisor, stopped by to say that there would be a short meeting in the break room after lunch. She was cheerful and friendly about it, but would not reveal anything about the meeting.

After Mary was out of earshot, Hazel said to Samuel, "If they are having this all of a sudden and won’t say why, it’s bad news."

Samuel looked worried, and tapped his pencil against the clipboard. "Maybe they’re going to close the warehouse. I know they have this one and another one in Tisdale and maybe they can’t keep two running."

"The deliveries are going out," said Hazel. "All the trucks leave, so they must be doing good business, don’t you think?”

Big Pete came into the end of Aisle 22F East, and at once both Samuel and Hazel got busy with checking expiration dates.

Neither Samuel nor Hazel was very hungry at lunchtime, so they just sat on the brick wall around the parking lot, nibbling from a bag of Fritos and pretending to smoke Kools. They stubbed out their menthols and made a point of coming inside before Big Pete emerged from his pickup. They let the warehouse door slam shut behind them just before Big Pete got there, and pretended not to see him as he steamed by, shooting them a poisonous look before elbowing his way into the break room to take the most comfortable chair.

The meeting was short but not sweet. Mary got up first and said thank you to everyone for attending, that she appreciated their time, and what a good job they’d been doing. Then she said that Roger had some important information to share, and the whole group looked glum before Roger got to the front of the room. He settled himself against the edge the table which held the coffee supplies, then cleared his throat and frowned down at a stapled set of yellow sheets in his left hand.

"Okay, then," said Roger, smoothing the end of his tie. "You know the drill. Corporate has sent down a directive that anybody who’s a Level II or below is going to three-quarter time. You keep your benefits package the same, and hourly pay rate’s the same, but your weekly time sheet's got to be 28 hours maximum. You can do that as four 7-hour days or you can work short-shift five days and have your afternoons off, however you want to work it. Mary’s got your acceptance forms to sign, and you put your preference down on that, side 2."

Big Pete called out, "So that’s just Level II on down?" He shot a hateful look at Samuel and Hazel,
"It’s only mandatory for Levels I and II," said Roger, rolling the yellow papers into a tube and folding his hands around it. "Level III and up can keep their regular hours or go to short-shift if they want." He stopped leaning on the coffee supply table, and the styrofoam cup of sugar substitute packets fell over, cascading Equal and Splenda packets across the surface of the table. Roger tapped the roll of yellow paper against his leg twice, glanced very briefly around the room, nodded briskly and left.

Mary, looking uncomfortable, began passing out sheets titled Acceptance of Revised Work Schedules, and smiling at each recipient as though the papers were honor roll certificates for straight-A students.
Big Pete and several other Level III workers got up, leaving the acceptance sheets on the tables, and went back out to the warehouse. Hazel, Samuel, and another eighteen or twenty Level I and II employees sat at the tables, staring blankly at the paperwork as Mary set out little boxes of blue pens, each stamped with "L H. Jenkins Medical Supply" in gold setters. Samuel didn’t move, but Hazel reached for a pen, signed her name and put the date at the bottom of the page, turned it over and checked "5-Day Work Week, Short Shift.” She slid the page to Mary, who collected it and put it under the little stack she held with slightly trembling hands. Mary went to straighten up the coffee supply table, and slowly, the workers began to pick up pens and sign the acceptance sheets. Finally only Samuel was left. He had taken his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and he was going slowly over the document, his lips moving slightly. "I don’t know,” he said in a low voice to Hazel, who continued to sit in her molded plastic, chair beside him. "Do you think I should sign it?"

"It says if you don’t, the company can’t guarantee you any hours," said Hazel. "I think it’s 28 hours with your full benefits, or no hours and no benefits.”

"I don't see how they can--" began Samuel, but then he bit his lip, picked up the blue pen Hazel had used, and signed his sheet. He turned it over and said, "Did you do the short shift?"

"Yes," said Hazel.

Samuel checked the box for five days, short shift and put his pen back into the cardboard container. Mary, who had been fussing around with red plastic coffee stirrers and the cylinder of powdered creamer, gently stepped over to the table and waited for Samuel to lean away from his sheet so she could take it.

"It might just be temporary," said Mary, not looking directly at either Hazel or Samuel. "We don’t really know what they are thinking up at Corporate." She began gathering the boxes of blue pens and rolling them around inside till the gold embossing showed across the top of each box. "Hazel," Mary said quickly, carrying the pens to the door and then stopping for a moment. "You’re Level I, and it might be good if you had some kind of a back-up, another prospect where you could transfer your benefits over."  She put the lid on the pen box. "If anything else happened," she said weakly, then she walked back quickly, grabbed the stack of acceptance sheets and stuck these under the box of pens in her hand.  "I don't know anything for sure, don’t quote me on any of that." Mary dashed from the room, dropping a couple of loose L. H. Jenkins ballpoints on the carpet as she went.


***

As the end of the work day, Hazel forgot her shoulder bag and had to go back to her locker for it, making her just late enough to miss the #53 Longbridge/Hunter bus at 5:34. She read Pride and Prejudice at the bus stop, shifting her weight from one tired leg to the other one. She tried making a couple of notes, but the wind blew her folded piece of notebook paper around and she gave up and jammed the notes page into her jacket pocket.  She was able to wedge her way onto the crowded 6:02 bus and had to stand up all the way to her stop.

At home, she kept busy. She usually ran laundry through on Monday night, and it was cosy in the kitchen with, the mini washer/dryer stack humming. She made a comforting mix of half cocoa mix and half instant coffee, and sat in a kitchen chair, reading Pride and Prejudice and stopping now and then to take a load of wet laundry from the small washer compartment at the bottom and move it up to the tiny dryer at the top of the unit. It look a long time to do two full loads of laundry this way, even more if she did sheets and towels, but it was much nicer than going across the parking lot to the dimly-lit laundry building, which was uncomfortably far away from the rest of the complex, and where one of the washers was stained inside with s dark tarry substance which didn’t bear closer examination.

A  series of sharp raps on Hazel's front door startled her.  The raps seemed sinister since she’d just been thinking about the creepy laundry building. She sneaked down the front hall to the door on quiet feet and looked through the fish-eye lens. She saw Mr Abid, the complex manager, who was examining the flaking paint on the metal door frame and looking annoyed.

Hazel opened the door, and said brightly, "Hi there, Mr. Abid."

"Hi, Mrs. Duckworth," said Mr. Abid. "i’ll get somebody over here to fix this paint.  I paid my sister’s boy to touch up the metal, and it looks like he used interior latex. He is not meant for this type of work, I don’t think. He is good at sports, I think he should pursue that.” He frowned again at the door frame, and picked off a flake of tan latex. He placed it In his palm and poked it with the forefinger of his other hand. "Yes, latex. See how it cracks like that? Hmm, hmm, hmm.” He shook his head and dusted the paint flakes off his hands onto the asphalt parking lot behind him. Turning back to Hazel, he took an envelope out of his shirt pocket and gave it to Hazel. "It’s time for the lease renewals again," he said. "Can you believe how quickly the time goes? I’ll just leave this now and you can sign it and drop it off at the office when it’s a good time for you. There’s a little slot in the office door, you know what I mean? You can just put it in there and --  in, fails in.” Mr. Abid demonstrated a little gliding throw. "No rush. The lease doesn’t end until the end of the month." He tapped the door frame. "I’ll get a real painter out to fix this up," he said. "I have a buddy that does good work, I'll see maybe he'll come fix this, get this latex off and do it right."

"All right," said Hazel. Behind her the dryer buzzed from the kitchen. "Oh, there’s my laundry in the dryer."

"Okay, I'lI let you go," said Mr. Abid. He gave a little wave and his mustache lifted, indicating a smile underneath it. He began walking along the building, stopping here and there to pick at the paint on other door frames.

Hazel shut the door and fastened both deadbolts, then went to the kitchen where she dropped the envelope on the table next to her cold cup of cocoa-coffee mix, and then opened the dryer door to take out a warm pile of slacks and blouses.

Once the laundry was folded, she put her coffee cup into the microwave and hit the "Warm Up" button. While the microwave hummed, she went to the living room and picked up a pen from the card table, then came back to open the envelope Mr. Abid had dropped off.

She scanned the lease agreement and was about to sign when she noticed the handwritten dollar amount written on the line after the words "monthly payment amount." The rent was going up a hundred dollars a month.

The microwave beeped, but she ignored it and looked through the lease again, hoping to find that her regular rent amount was written in some other blank, but she gave up and dropped the lease form on the table. The microwave beeped again, "All right," Hazel said grumpily, punching the door release button and taking out the warm cup. She took a sip, but the instant coffee taste had overcome the cocoa flavor. Making a face, poured the rest down the sink, leaving a brownish sludge in the bottom of the ceramic cup. She put it down on the counter without rinsing it, and wandered out of the kitchen, leaving the light burning.


***

Sitting at Samuel’s dining room table and eating Black Forest cake, Hazel looked through a cardboard box full of receipts, bank statements, grocery store coupons, junk mail, and mortgage documents.

"Is it a big mess?” asked Samuel, setting a cup of freshly-brewed coffee next to Hazel’s plate, "We’ve never been good in this family with money things."

"I think everything’s here," said Hazel. She took a sip of the coffee. "Mmm, this is so much better than instant."

"You drink instant coffee?" asked Samuel, startled. He put down his cup and looked at Hazel.

"If you put in some cocoa mix, it’s drinkable," said Hazel. She removed a wire clothes hanger from the box. The hanger's paper cover read "McSwann’s Dry Cleaning. In by 9, out by 4. Shirt service." She set the hanger aside and pulled out a packet with a sticker reading "Sungate Title Company."

Hazel opened the packet and took out some official-looking documents with notary imprints and shiny metallic seals. "All right, here we are. Yes, here’s the deed to the house that your folks got from the bank when they paid off the mortgage, and here’s a copy of the receipt for the last payment, and some other stuff." She shuffled through the papers. "And they didn’t take out any second mortgages or equity lines or anything on the house?"

"No," said Samuel. "They didn’t even have credit cards. Dad’s father signed a note against his farm to buy a new tractor, and the crops didn't come in, and the whole 130 acres went to the bank just like that. Dad wouldn’t let Mom charge clothes at the Sears store or anything." He cut a narrow slice from the Black Forest cake and held it out on a spatula toward Hazel, who held out her crumb-covered plate to take the offered second slice.

"Well, let’s go to one bank each week," said Hazel. “Now that we’re on short shift, we can start going places in the afternoon. We’ll get three loan offers and you can decide which one works for you.”

Samuel went to the kitchen and brought back the coffeepot. He warmed up Hazel’s coffee and took the pot back to the coffee maker.  From the kitchen, he said, "You know, this house is bigger than I need. I have two bedrooms that don't get used and there’s a sun room in the back that would make a good office or a writing studio."

"Have you been thinking about getting a roommate?" Hazel asked, turning her fork sideways to cut off a sliver of cake.

"Well, when is your lease up?" asked Samuel, sitting down at his-place and taking a sip of coffee.

"Oh, gee," said Hazel. "Don't you think we’d kill each other? We both hated being married."

"Well, I wasn't thinking about getting married," said Samuel.  "I don’t think I'll want any more girlfriends for a long time. But you know, with the hours cut back, and we both have projects to work on, and I just thought, well, you know."

"Did I tell you they raised my rent?" said Hazel, resting her elbow on the table and then resting her head on her hand. "I guess it couldn’t stay that low forever but now it’s a hundred dollars more.”

"See?" said Samuel. "Seems like we ought to work this out. And Mary said that thing about you being Level I."

Hazel sipped her coffee and then looked at her cup. "I keep telling myself I should get my good skirt suit dry-cleaned. ! might need to start interviewing."

"Look,’ said Samuel. "This house is paid off "

"You’ll have a small monthly payment to make if you take the loan," said Hazel. "Maybe a couple hundred dollars - depends on what you borrow."

"But that’s way less than the rent I was paying on my apartment,” said Samuel. "Well, I don’t want to push it on you." He stood up and picked up his plate and cup. "I’ve already been thinking about it but you haven’t had a chance to get used to the idea. Or maybe you wouldn’t want to be around all these beetles." He reached over and lifted a copy of American Coieopterology Journal. "Sarah was never crazy about the creepy critters."

"The work you do is important," said Hazel. "If you worked at a university or an institute or something, you’d make good money and people would call you up to ask you beetle questions. People call you now, don’t they?"

"Mostly just to ask me why I sent them a calendar with bug pictures instead of pictures of John, Paul, George, and Ringo,” said Samuel.

"Oh, that’s not true," said Hazel. "That one place asked you to send in the photo of the beetle with the red necktie, and before that you had an article in a magazine."

"Just the extension newsletter," said Samuel. "But I did get a note from a lady who said thanks for helping her with potato beetle identification."

"See?" said Hazel, standing up. "i need to think about the moving thing. Can I tell you tomorrow at work?" She put the back of her hand over her mouth to cover a yawn. "You’d think this coffee would perk me up, but I’m too tired to think."

"It’s decaf," said Samuel. "My mom never sewed anything with caffeine after six. She didn’t want people to wake up in the middle of the night and think hateful thoughts about her keeping them up." He went into the living room and came back with Hazel’s jacket and his own.


***

In the darkest part of the night, there was a loud bang which sent Hazel into an upright position, pillows tumbling to the floor. There was another loud explosion, and Haze! thought dimly that there might have been one before she sat up in bed. Could a car backfire that many times that quick?
Outside her door, she heard another apartment door slam open, and a man was screaming, "You don’t have custody! The judge never gave you custody! You are such a liar!" There was another scary bang, more of a boom really, and then a car roared out of the parking lot and hit another vehicle. There was the sound of glass and metal hitting the pavement, then the car must have backed up violently, because there were the sounds of another collision. The car roared away, and Hazel could hear someone crying, and people running.

Hazel got up and dressed in the work clothes she’d laid out on the back of a chair, then she began stripping the sheets and blankets off the bed. She carried these into the kitchen and dumped them in a pile on the linoleum in front of the washer/dryer combo. The whining call of an approaching ambulance or a police car began and got louder. To drown it out, Hazel pushed the bottom sheet into the washer, filling the tub. She added soap and pushed the start button. Water began splashing inside the machine and the motor began to thrum. The siren outside got louder but then it wound down and there were door slams and walkie-talkie squawks. Hazel opened a cabinet door and found the Swiss Miss cocoa box and the instant coffee jar. After a moment, she put the cocoa and coffee back. Then she stooped and opened a lower cabinet, where she found a glass drip pot and a plastic filter cone. She rinsed these and putthem on the counter, then after a fruitless search for filters, she opened a folded paper napkin and put that inside the plastic cone.  In the freezer she found a small brown bag of French roast. She trickled some of this into the napkin/filter. She rinsed and filled the smudgy chrome kettle, and set it over a flame on the right front burner.

Outside her apartment, Hazel heard the nasal beeps of a back-up warning device. She guessed that a tow truck might be getting ready to fake away one of the broken cars. The washing machine began agitating, which helped drown out the parking lot sounds. Hazel went to the living room to find her shoulder bag and dig out Pride and Prejudice. She sat down with the book in the old kitchen chair, and turned to page 271. At page 299, the kettle whistled and she took the time to let the boiling water drizzle over the coffee, as Samuel would do, so that it wouldn’t surge up the side of the cone and push grounds up over the napkin edge and down into the pot.

The coffee, a little strong, helped her finish Pride and Prejudice and by the time she needed to leave for her bus, she’d also finished the entry for the Duckworth Review. She put her lunch sack into her shoulder bag, along with the iPod and a copy of Willkie Collins' The Woman in White, and slipped on her jacket. At the front door, she unlocked both deadbolts, but it was difficult to turn the doorknob. Her stomach gripped tightly for a moment -- maybe the coffee? - but then she relaxed and made herself open the front door. There was nothing to indicate the night’s trouble except for a strand of yellow caution tape still wound around one of the metal trellises, and a few specks of glittering glass on the patchy black asphalt. Hazel locked the door behind her and moved quickly toward the bus stop.

When she got to the warehouse, there was no sign of Samuel. Usually he came to find her at her locker or the time clock, partly out of friendship and partly because they usually worked as partners. But today he wasn’t around, though she could see (without actually touching his time card in the slot) that he had clocked in at 8:57.

She went to the break room for coffee, and then once there, decided her stomach had absorbed ail it could take. She wasn’t sure if Samuel had pulled a cart or not, so she went to Aisle 8R West and found him busily putting boxes of sterile cotton swabs on the cart.

"Hi," Hazel said. "How many more do you need to load?"

"Just these two," Samuel said. He didn’t look up, but Hazel could see he was anxious.

"You realize, don’t you," said Hazel. "That once Big Pete figures out the living arrangements, he’s going to make kissing noises at us all the time?"

"Probably," said Samuel.  "Or maybe he’ll visit a greenhouse and touch a Paederus beetle and then scratch his crotch. That would keep him off work for a while,"

"I don’t even want to know." said Hazel. "You don’t have any of those at home, do you?”

"Not intentionally," said Samuel. "But it is a common genus in North America."


***

On Saturday, the same friend with the truck who’d taken all Samuel’s father’s newspapers to the recycling center came to Hazel’s apartment building and was able, with the use of many bungee cords and yards of rope, to get all Hazel’s large belongings on the truck. She left the card table behind because there was a desk she could use in the sun room at the back of Samuel’s house.

Hazel loaded her car with linens and clothing and bags of paperbacks and she got to the house just as the truck pulled all the way up the driveway so the furniture could be carried in through the garage. Hazel parked at the curb, and it took four trips to bring in plastic sacks filled with sheets, towels, and clothes. The last thing in the back seat was a cardboard carton with all the spiral notebooks of The Duckworth Review stacked inside it.

Samuel and his friend were lugging furniture-through the garage, so. she carried the box around the outside of the house, in the back door and through the kitchen to the sun room. The desk was set up facing an aluminum-frame window which looked out into the green, leafy back yard. On the desk, a computer monitor sat with an internet page pulled up onscreen.  Hazel put down the box and looked at the computer screen.

"Welcome to duckworthreview.com" was written in large white letters at the center. Underneath this it said, "A resource guide for students and readers who want to find out about great books."

The rest of the screen was blank except for a little animated cartoon creature with a duck’s head and fiat webbed feet, with a hardcover book for a body. The little book-duck waddled across the screen, turned its head to look.at Hazel, and when a quack came out of the computer speakers, Hazel laughed.    ,    . 

Samuel appeared in the doorway. "You can change it if you want," he said. "I got the domain name and then 1 thought I should start the home page so you can fix it up like you want. You just click the text and then when you get the edit window, just backspace to erase what's there."

"I love it just like it is," said Hazel. "You think anybody would ever come look at it?"

"If you e-mail some schools and libraries and so on, sure," said Samuel. "Listen, can you come help us? Bob and I need to get the mattresses in out of the truck bed. They won’t go through the door to the garage, so we have to get them up the driveway."

Hazel followed him to the front door, where Samuel stopped at a small table with a lamp and a key basket on it. He picked up a little ceramic tile, and showed it to Hazel. "Can you believe my mom had this in a box in the basement?" The plaque had two smiling Casper-type ghosts floating at the corners and below them, in raised letters, it said "Nobodies’ Home."

"Should we put it on the front door?” said Hazel.

"Yes, but let's wait till we bring the mattresses in," said Samuel. "I don’t want to knock it loose.”

"By the way, what are we having for dinner?" said Hazel, following Samuel to the truck, where Bob stood in the bed, ready to tip the box springs down over the tailgate.

"Seven-layer burritos,” said Samuel. "Bob and I stopped at Toco Bell on the way here, and we about took the speaker thing off with the back corner of your bedstead."

"Ready?" said Bob from above, beginning to let the mattress slide down.

"I guess," said Hazel and Samuel at the same time, reaching up.