“Gretel! Where you at? I find you. You’ll be sorry. I swear, you will this time.”
Arlene Driscoll stared at the empty closet with the blinking eyes of a toad. The girl wasn’t there. Arlene slammed the door, wincing against the stink of soiled panties heaped in the corner. These kids, this one in particular, weren’t worth the meager pay the state offered to house ’em, just weren’t worth the trouble.
The girl was in first grade and she still couldn’t control her bowels. Well, she could clean her own panties or go without, maybe then she’d learn, if she had to clean them herself and smell it. Rubbing her nose in her mess sure hadn’t done nothing so far.
Arlene stomped down the hall, beer slopping from the plastic cup she gripped in her hand.
“Look now what you made me do! Spilled on my good jeans. You’re making me miss my show!” Arlene licked at the beer suds on her wrist. The girl was maddening. She acted like a baby. Hiding. Moping. Whining. She was way too old for this crap. I’m too old for it, Arlene thought as she stormed to the front room and watched her TV show and chugged what was left of her beer.
“Three hundred fifty!” she shrieked at the TV. “You’re all overbidding, you buncha jackasses. That recliner ain’t worth a dime over three hundred bucks.”
The show host exulted, “You all overbid!”
Jackasses. Arlene blinked hard as if she’d just snapped awake. “You better hope I don’t find you,” she shouted at the girl she could not find.
She looked behind the chair where the girl sometimes hid herself, even though she’d looked there twice already and the girl wasn’t there now anymore than she’d been there the first two times. Arlene swung open the door to the cellar and yelled down, “If you’re down there you better come up. I’m not going down there this time. Come up or I’m going to close this door and lock it and you can just stay down there all night. Maybe learn something this time. How’d that be? I mean it. I’m gonna give you to three.
“One.
“I’m not playing.
“Two.
“All right then.
“Three!
“Don’t cry say you wasn’t warned, because you was.”
Arlene slammed the door so hard the casing split. She threw the deadbolt and poured herself another beer, slumping on the couch to watch the tube.
She shuddered at the thought that the girl had run off. If the girl had run off, Arlene would face far worse from Lewis than that brat had ever faced.
The game show host shouted: “You all overbid!”
“Jackasses!” Arlene shouted.
Each and every one. Jackasses.
What was wrong with people?