Not that it really mattered, he supposed.

9

One day not long before the thumbectomy - perhaps even less than a week - Annie had come in with two giant dishes of vanilla ice-cream, a can of Hershey's chocolate syrup, a pressure can of Reddi-Whip, and a jar in which maraschino cherries red as heart's blood floated like biology specimens.

“I thought I'd make us sundaes, Paul,” Annie said. Her tone was spuriously jolly. Paul didn't like it. Not her tone of voice, nor the uneasy look in her eyes. I'm being a naughty girl, that look said. It made him wary, put his wind up. It was too easy for him to imagine her looking exactly the same way when she put a heap of clothes on one set of stairs, a dead cat on another.

“Why, thank you, Annie.” he said, and watched as she poured the syrup and puffed two cumulus clouds of whipped cream out of the pressure can. She performed these chores with the practiced, heavy hand of the long-time sugar junkie.

“No need for thanks. You deserve it. You've been working so hard.” She gave him his sundae. The sweetness became cloying after the third bite, but he kept on. It was wiser. One of the key rules to survival here on the scenic Western Slope was, to wit, When Annie's treatin, you best be eatin. There was silence for awhile, and then Annie put her spoon down, wiped a mixture of chocolate syrup and melting ice-cream off her chin with the back of her hand, and said pleasantly: “Tell me the rest.” Paul put his own spoon down. “I beg your pardon?”

“Tell me the rest of the story. I can't wait. I just can't.” And hadn't he known this was coming? Yes. If someone had delivered all twenty reels of the new Rocket Man chapter-play to Annie's house, would she have waited, parcelling out only one a week, or even one a day?

He looked at the half-demolished avalanche of her sundae, one cherry almost buried in whipped cream, another floating in chocolate syrup. He remembered the way the living room had looked, with sugar-glazed dishes everywhere.

No. Annie was not the waiting type. Annie would have watched all twenty episodes in one night, even if they gave her eyestrain and a splitting headache.

Because Annie loved sweet things.

“I can't do that,” he said.

Her face had darkened at once, but hadn't there been a shadowy relief there, as well? “Oh? Why not?” Because you wouldn't respect me in the morning, he thought of saying, and clamped down on that. Clamped down hard.

“Because I'm a rotten story-teller,” he answered instead.

She slurped up the remainder of her sundae in five huge spoonfuls that would have left Paul's throat gray with frostbite. Then she set her dish down and looked at him angrily, not as if he were the great Paul Sheldon but as if he were someone who had presumed to criticize the great Paul Sheldon.

“If you're such a rotten story-teller, how come you have best-sellers and millions of people love the books you write?”

“I didn't say I was a rotten story-writer. I actually happen to think I'm pretty good at that. But as a story-teller, I'm the pits.”

“You're just making up a big cockadoodie excuse.” Her face was darkening. Her hands were clenched into shiny fists on the heavy material of her skirt. Hurricane Annie was back in the room. Everything that went around came around. Except things no longer had been quite the same, had they? He was as scared of her as ever, but her hold over him had nonetheless diminished. His life no longer seemed like such a big deal, gotta or no gotta. He was only afraid she would hurt him.

“It's not an excuse,” he had replied. “The two things are like apples and oranges, Annie. People who tell stories usually can't write stories. If you really think people who can write stories can talk worth a damn, you never watched some poor slob of a novelist fumbling his way through an interview on the Today show.”

“Well, I don't want to wait,” she sulked. “I made you that nice sundae and the least you could do is tell me a few things. It doesn't have to exactly be the whole story, I guess, but… did the Baron kill Calthorpe?” Her eyes sparkled. “That's one thing I really want to know. And what did he do with the body if he did? Is it all cut up in that trunk his wife won't let out of her sight? That's what I think.” Paul shook his head - not to indicate she had it wrong but to indicate he would not tell.

She became even blacker. Yet her voice was soft. “You're making me very angry - you know that, don't you, Paul?”

“Of course I know it. But I can't help it.”

“I could make you. I could make you help it. I could make you tell.” But she looked frustrated, as if knowing that she could not. She could make him say some things, but she could not make him tell.

“Annie, do you remember telling me what a little kid says to his mother when she catches him playing with the cleaning fluid under the sink and makes him stop? Mommy, you're mean! Isn't that what you're saying now? Paul, you're mean!”

“If you make me much madder, I don't promise to be responsible,” she said, but he sensed the crisis was already past - she was strangely vulnerable to these concepts of discipline and behavior.

“Well, I'll have to chance that,” he said, “because I'm just like that mother - I'm not saying no to be mean, or to spite you - I'm saying no because I really want you to like the story… and if I give you what you want, you won't like it, and you won't want it anymore.” And then what will happen to me, Annie? he thought but did not say.

“At least tell me if that nigger Hezekiah really does know where Misery's father is! At least tell me that!”

“Do you want the novel, or do you want me to fill out a questionnaire?”

“Don't you take that sarcastic tone to me!”

“Then don't you pretend you don't understand what I'm saying!” he shouted back. She recoiled from him in surprise and unease, the last of that blackness going out of her face, and all that was left was that weird little-girl look, that I've-been-naughty look. “You want to cut open the golden goose! That's what it comes down to! But when the farmer in the story finally did that, all he had was a dead goose and a bunch of worthless guts!”

“All right,” she said. “All right, Paul. Are you going to finish your sundae?”

“I can't eat any more,” he said.

“I see. I've upset you. I'm sorry. I expect that you're right. I was wrong to ask.” She was perfectly calm again. He had half-expected another period of deep depression or rage to follow, but none had. They had simply gone back to the old routine, Paul writing, Annie reading each day's output, and enough time had passed between the argument and the thumbectomy that Paul had missed the connection. Until now.

I bitched about the typewriter, he thought, looking at it now and listening to the drone of the mower. It sounded fainter now, and he was marginally aware that wasn't because Annie was moving away but because he was. He was drowsing off. He did that a lot now, simply drowsed off like some old fart in a nursing home.

Not a lot; I only bitched about it that once. But once was enough, wasn't it? More than enough. That was - what? - a week after she brought those oogy sundaes? Just about that. Just one week and one bitch. About how the clunk of that dead key was driving me crazy. I didn't even suggest she get another used typewriter from Nancy Whoremonger or whoever that woman was, one with all its keys intact. I just said those clunks are driving me crazy, and then, in almost no time at all, presto chango, when it comes to Paul's left thumb, now you see it and now you don't. Except she didn't really do it because I bitched about the typewriter, did she? She did it because I told her no and she had to accept that. It was an act of rage. The rage was the result of realization. What realization? Why, that she didn't hold all the cards after all - that I had a certain passive hold over her. The power of the gotta. I turned out to be a pretty passable Scheherazade after all.