Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

Good Old Mom by Sharon Mitchell

It’s been said that no one is a hundred percent good or bad, that everyone is a combination of both. That must mean that “mean” is not necessarily bad, because Good Old Mom, otherwise known as Felicia Hooks, was just plain mean. One hundred percent mean. A mean woman. Phoebe suspected that by the time she was a few hours old her mother had already decided she didn’t like her very much. Why else would she name her Phoebe, for Pete’s sake?

Felicia didn’t like Phoebe, yet she clung to her like a burr in a spaniel’s ear. Phoebe was her only child, and her husband had disappeared long ago. Good Old Mom seemed to feel like she should get some return for having put up (so to speak) with her daughter all the years she was growing up. Phoebe felt like she should get the Purple Heart for surviving into her thirty-second year.

“Mom’s not a fragile old woman,” Phoebe told her psychologist one bright afternoon in October as they sat in his cosy little office. “Never had a sick day in her life, and she’s even kind of a young looking sixty-six.

“She was with a traveling carnival for years before she got married and had me. Never remarried after my father hit the road, though — probably because she’s got the personality of a rattlesnake. That’s probably why it took her over thirty years to land a husband in the first place.”

The psychologist cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Comparing Mom to a rattlesnake may not be fair to the rattlesnake,” Phoebe continued. “She’s kept me single, too. What man in his right mind would want me when the package includes a mother-in-law like Felicia Hooks?”

“Would it have to be a package deal?” Brock Weaver asked as he scribbled a hasty note in his notebook. He was a long, lean man of thirty-seven with an incongruous halo of golden curls.

“I can’t get away from her.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve tried, believe me. She always comes along and moves in on me. Next time I’m not going to leave a forwarding address or anything. I’m just going to make a clean break once and for all.”

“You’re planning to move away?”

“As far as I can, as soon as I can afford it.”

“Maybe it would be better to stay and try to resolve your problems with your mother.”

“Impossible. You wouldn’t say that if you knew Good Old Mom.”

“It’s not so unusual for a young woman not to hit it off so well with her mother. Then, as the years go by, she finds herself identifying more with her.”

“Heaven forbid.”

“Mother-daughter relationships often improve with age.”

“You don’t know my mother.”

“Do you think I should? Perhaps some joint counseling—”

Phoebe flopped back in her chair and rolled her eyes. “Oh, wow!”

“Why do you say that, Phoebe?”

“My mother thinks you guys are all quacks. She’d never come within a mile of you.

“She doesn’t even know I come here.”

“Maybe it’s time you told her. Maybe she should know how distressed you are about your relationship with her.”

“She knows how distressed I am. Believe me, she knows, and she loves it.”

Brock put the notebook down on the table next to his chair. He folded long, thin hands on one knee and regarded her with baby blue eyes. He wore blue-jeans and a blue sweater and the longest sneakers Phoebe had ever seen on human feet. “So often,” he said kindly, “people suffer needlessly because they don’t communicate. They assume the other person knows how they feel when really they haven’t an inkling.”

Phoebe’s brown gaze fell before Brock’s steady blue one. Looking down at her hands, she traced invisible circles on the knees of her own jeans. “It’s not possible to communicate with my mother,” she muttered uneasily. “You just don’t understand.”

“You do it every day,” he said. “Every time you speak to her — that’s communication. All you need to do now is find the right kind of communication. I think I’m going to give you an assignment this week, Phoebe. You don’t have to mention me, but every day until we meet again I want you to tell your mother about at least one thing she does that distresses you. And then you must ask her what you do that distresses her.”

“And then if I’m the one who’s still alive next Wednesday, I’ll keep our appointment.”

Brock laughed and patted her knee. “It won’t be as bad as all that. You may even be pleasantly surprised.”

“Sure,” Phoebe said.

Actually, Phoebe thought as she drove her sick old car home, what I ought to do is see if I can land Brock. He knew everything about her. It would make life so simple because she wouldn’t have to lie to him or try to keep him from meeting her mother. The problem was — though she was fond of him — he did not excite her romantically. She couldn’t get past that halo of golden curls, she supposed, and he was way too tall. He stood at least six six to her five two, and he was not by any stretch handsome with his short little nose and long chin. Handsomeness was not a prerequisite with her, but she did prefer that her men not be funny looking and Brock was... sort of. Still, she did like him tremendously. If she married Brock — well, he’d know how to handle a mother-in-law like Felicia Hooks.

Of course Brock was thoroughly professional. He had ethics up to his earlobes. In the six weeks she’d been seeing him, he’d never made a pass at her. But it had happened before. Doctors had married their patients, and shrinks had married their clients. Yes, her life would be so much simpler if she married Brock, who knew so much about her, but when she tried to imagine them sharing a bed she had to laugh.

When Phoebe reached her apartment building, a square stucco affair with a red California tile roof, she parked the car and crossed a small yard carpeted with pungent, multicolored leaves to climb stairs to the second floor. The last time she had moved away from Good Old Mom, she had intentionally leased a tiny one bedroom apartment so she wouldn’t have room for her. Now she slept on the couch every night while Mom occupied the bedroom.

She had lived alone for two blissful months while Felicia, as usual, simply refused to pay rent at the old address. Then, again as usual, she’d been evicted and had turned up at Phoebe’s door with three suitcases, several large wooden crates, and her green parakeet in his cage.

During those two blissful months Phoebe had told herself that she would not let her mother move in again but, somehow, she had done just that, just as always. Now the woman’s eclectic collection of decorating horrors smothered the little apartment. Now the single bedroom was undeniably Mom’s domain, from the parakeet in the cage by the window, to walls hung with garish photos of Good Old Mom during her belly dancing days with the carnival, to equally garish satin cushions that said things like A Souvenir of San Francisco on one side. What didn’t fit into the tiny bedroom overflowed into the tiny living room.

She paused outside the door with the key in her hand and sighed. Two more months on the lease. By then she’d have close to five thousand dollars in her savings account. She’d have to give up a good job, of course, but if she moved from Oregon to Maine or Florida or New York, she didn’t see how Good Old Mom could possibly follow her with the suitcases and the wooden crates and the parakeet. In two months she’d be free. Maybe Brock could keep her sane until then.

Felicia Hooks was on the couch watching tabloid television when Phoebe summoned the courage to go inside. The older woman’s bleached hair was carefully set on big green rollers (bingo night). She wore a blue cotton robe splashed with bright red flowers and crew socks — white with red stripes. Dragging cold gray eyes away from the television, she swept her daughter with a sour look. “What’s for dinner?” she growled in her raspy voice.

Phoebe thought about Brock’s assignment. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said, collapsing wearily into the tiny room’s single chair. “That’s the first thing you say to me every day when I get home, and it’s really very irritating. Besides, I work hard and I’m tired. It wouldn’t hurt you to cook once in a while.”

“Well, la-dee-da!” Felicia said, her wide mouth curling into a sneer. “Aren’t we sensitive today. Not to mention late.”

“I always get home later on Wednesdays.”

“The least you could do is bring hamburgers. You know how hungry I get when you’re late.”

Phoebe popped angrily up out of the chair. “I think I’ll eat out tonight. What you do is up to you.” She slammed out of the apartment before Felicia could launch her tirade about how many meals she’d fixed for her when she was a kid.

At least I communicated, she told herself as she thundered downstairs and out of the building, though she knew that wasn’t quite what Brock had had in mind. Now her mother would have to either cook for herself or go out, which meant spending some of her own money on food, both of which she hated to do. The thought cheered Phoebe. Smiling, she drove downtown and had a good dinner at a nice restaurant.

She dawdled over dinner. Good Old Mom always left for bingo night at the Odd Fellows Hall at seven o’clock. If she stayed away long enough, she might not have to deal with her mother again until after work the next day. Felicia frequently stopped off at a bar after bingo with her old battle-axe of a crony, Pansy Holloway. She’d be late getting home and, hangover or not, she always slept late in the mornings. Oddly enough, when she came home soused to the gills, she’d always tiptoe into her room and not bother Phoebe.

Things did work out for a change. Felicia, soused to the gills, came staggering in at one o’clock and tiptoed noisily into her room. Phoebe woke but pretended she hadn’t. As she drifted off to sleep again, she thought about Brock Weaver’s assignment and how she would communicate with her mother tomorrow.

“I wish you’d keep your ugly old souvenir pillows in the bedroom,” Phoebe said the next day after work. “I’d be embarrassed if anyone saw them.”

“As if anyone ever came here,” Felicia said with a snort. “As if you ever had a date, Ugg-face.”

“How can I, with you here? I never know how you’ll behave.”

“So meet the jerk someplace else. Besides, what’s so bad about your mother? Seems like I’m the only one around here who ever has a date.”

“Bar pickups, you mean? Sure, I could date as much as I wanted if I wasn’t very choosy, but I don’t happen to like the drunken old slobs you and Pansy pick up in scuzzy bars.”

“Phoebe Hooks! That’ll be enough out of you!”

She knew she wasn’t doing it right, that their communication should be gentler, but at least she remembered the other half of Brock’s assignment. “I’ve told you about something you do that bothers me. Now it’s only fair to let you talk about what bothers you.”

Felicia gave her a wicked grin. “You got all night, Ugg-face?”

“I couldn’t complete the assignment,” Phoebe told Brock the following Wednesday. “All I said was that I wished she’d keep her ugly old souvenir pillows in the bedroom. I didn’t turn it into a personal attack. Well, maybe a little, but I didn’t tell her she was ugly and stupid and worthless and use every insult I could think of like she did when it was her turn. I can’t take it. I’ve listened to that all my life, and it flattens my ego. She knows it, too. It’s her weapon.”

“Hmm,” Brock said as he wrote in his notebook. “Perhaps this is a little more serious than I thought.”

“Now you’re getting the picture. Do you know what her pet name for me is? Ugg-face.”

“Let me assure you that you are not an ugg-face.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you think your mother is emotionally disturbed?”

“At least.”

Brock crossed his big feet on the coffee table and leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers thoughtfully. “So you feel it’s utterly impossible to improve your relationship with your mother?”

“Well, no, actually. If I gave up any idea of ever having a life of my own, if I decided I was put on this earth to support Felicia Hooks and keep her happy, then I’m sure our relationship would improve a little. She’s not quite so nasty if I do everything her way.”

“What do you think she’d like you to do for her?”

“She’d like me to get a bigger, nicer apartment in a complex with a swimming pool and all the extras. She’d like me to buy her a new car and put her name on all my credit cards. She’d like me to give her a generous allowance so she wouldn’t have to spend her Social Security. She’d like to go to Europe at least once a year.”

“Could you afford to do any of those things if you wanted to?”

“Not if I’m going to make my escape again in another few weeks. That’s why I wear old clothes and drive a junker. Every extra dime goes into my escape fund.”

“But if you wanted to...”

“I’m a computer troubleshooter — I fix computers, in other words — and I make good money. I guess I could probably do some of those things.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“What?”

“Send her on a cruise. A long one. Send her to Europe.”

“Are you serious?”

“Perfectly. Wouldn’t it be cheaper than uprooting yourself again?”

“Well, I suppose it would... But why should I give her a nice vacation?”

“Think of it as your vacation. She’d be out of your hair.”

“But she’d come back.”

“True, but maybe with an improved disposition.”

“Fat chance.”

“Look at it from her point of view. When was the last time somebody did something really wonderful for her of their own free will?”

“Well... never, as far as I know. She doesn’t deserve it.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Brock said softly with a smile lighting his baby blue eyes, “but you do. This is for you, Phoebe, not for her. You see, she’ll always be your mother, and you’ll always have to deal with her. Regardless of how badly she treats you, you won’t be able to abandon her without suffering for it emotionally. I know you.” He reached out and took her hands. “You’re far too fine and decent a person for it not to be that way. You’ve run away before, haven’t you, and yet you always take her in when she shows up homeless at your door. Do something that will make you both happy.”

Promising to give his suggestion some thought, Phoebe urged her aging car homeward. Brock did know her pretty well, all right, but the fact remained that he did not know Good Old Mom. He hadn’t lived with her for the better part of thirty-two years, and he couldn’t know how it rankled to spend a dime on her. But still, the thought of sending Felicia Hooks completely out of the country — out of her life — for a month or two... That would be heaven!

Besides, it had occurred to her that travel could be quite dangerous. It seemed to be open season on Americans all over the world. Terrorists were abundant. Maybe, if Good Old Mom went traveling, she wouldn’t come back at all. Who knew?

Impulsively, Phoebe stopped at a travel agency. Her first thought was to send Mom on a tour of the Middle East, but no, she’d have to be a bit more subtle than that or she’d never get the woman off her couch. It was fortunate, though — maybe even a sign of some sort — that Felicia’s birthday happened to be only a week away. She had just missed being born on Halloween by a few hours, in fact. Obviously a small error. If anyone had ever been meant to be born on Halloween, it was Felicia Hooks.

Felicia Hooks scowled suspiciously at her daughter. The little pouches of discontent at the corners of her mouth were even more evident than usual. “England and Ireland?” she said.

“And Scotland. You’ve always wanted to go, haven’t you?”

“Well... yes...” For once Good Old Mom seemed at a loss for words. “But why would you do this, Ugg — Phoebe?”

“It’s your birthday, isn’t it? It’s a birthday present.”

“We never give each other presents.”

“I know. We’ve never gotten along very well. I always used to blame you for that, but then I got to thinking that maybe I could have been nicer.” Phoebe threw in the clincher. “Besides, I owe it to you, don’t I, for all the years you took care of me when I was growing up?”

Felicia looked at the travel folder. “I’d have to leave in three weeks. It’ll be cold in England this time of year.”

“So? It’ll be cold here, too. It’s the off season; that’s how I got such a good deal. Christmas in London, Mom! If you don’t want to go, I will.”

So Felicia had her roots bleached, bought some new clothes and some new luggage, and was gone, all within three weeks. Phoebe had worried about the passport, but as it was the off season, that went speedily, too. “It’s wonderful,” she told Brock during her first appointment after her mother’s departure. “A three month tour of the British Isles. Something to do with haunted houses to make up for the time of year. The accommodations won’t be luxurious by any means, but good enough to keep her happy. Oh, I feel like a new woman already!” And she really had no control over the visions of crashed airplanes and bombed-out hotels that flashed through her brain.

“You look like a new woman,” Brock beamed. “One that doesn’t need my services any longer.”

They both laughed and Phoebe came very close to fluttering her eyelashes.

She stopped seeing Brock professionally, and they started dating. He still wasn’t the man of her dreams, but she did like him very much. The thought of sharing a bed with him began to seem less funny and more intriguing.

She packed Felicia’s things up and stored them in a rented bin in the basement of her apartment building. It was wonderful to have her apartment back again, to sleep in her own bed and not have to look at the garish sofa cushions. She had to keep the parakeet, of course, but she found that she liked the silly little bird and even went so far as to buy him a new cage and a pale blue roommate. That was the extent of her splurging, however. Every spare dime went into her savings account for Good Old Mom’s next trip... should she survive the first one.

November passed into December and December into January. Phoebe began to dread her mother’s return at the end of the month. She couldn’t depend upon a storm at sea to put an abrupt end to Good Old Mom’s homecoming, so she began to think that Felicia might like to stay on in England for a few more months. On January seventeenth, she sent her mother a cashier’s check for two thousand dollars, suggesting that she might like to see spring in the British Isles. It would be cheaper that way, she figured, than to have her come home and then send her off again. The return portion of her round-trip ticket could be cashed in or rescheduled, and Phoebe could have another four months of peace.

So time wore on. Phoebe worked hard and put money in the bank. She spent much of her free time with Brock, and she did not hear from Good Old Mom — not so much as a postcard and certainly no hint of a thank you — but she hadn’t expected to. What she did kind of expect, or hope for, was a telegram informing her that Felicia Hooks had been hit by a double-decker bus or that she’d run afoul of an IRA bomb. No such luck.

At the end of March, Brock proposed and she accepted. She didn’t think he was funny looking any more, and she supposed that she came as close to loving him as was possible. Having been raised by Good Old Mom, she probably didn’t know how to truly love anyone, but she promised herself that Brock would never be sorry he had married her.

“You’d better write your mother,” Brock said one cool evening as they walked in the park. “She’ll want to get home in time for the wedding.”

“I doubt she’ll care, Brock, but I’ll write to her.”

Felicia had, by that time, started sending postcards with terse little messages whenever she changed locations. Brock thought this was a good sign, that it meant she was beginning to miss her only child, but Phoebe knew better. It had just occurred to the woman that someone should always know where she was, that was all. It was just Good Old Mom looking out for Good Old Mom.

“I’ve never seen a mother yet who didn’t want to be at her daughter’s wedding,” Brock said.

Actually, Phoebe was thinking of sending her on to the Mediterranean. She dreaded the thought of Good Old Mom at her wedding, meeting Brock’s respectable family. And besides, there was a better chance for disaster in the Mediterranean. Remember Athens? They had that Red Brigade in Italy, didn’t they? And it was closer to the Persian Gulf.

Phoebe didn’t tell Brock all that. She just wrote to her mother as she had promised, telling her about the wedding (she could picture Good Old Mom snorting when she read that bit of news) and including some more money (which she had been forced to borrow from the bank) along with a ticket for a Mediterranean cruise (that she bought with a credit card). It would be up to Good Old Mom which direction she chose to travel. Phoebe had very little doubt about which way she’d decide to go.

The wedding was accomplished without Felicia Hooks, much to her daughter’s relief. Phoebe and Brock had a Hawaiian honeymoon, and when they returned, they moved into a nice new house. They took the parakeets with them, of course, and Felicia’s things were stored in the basement. And Phoebe kept sending money to Good Old Mom, who had decided to see the pyramids.

Toward the end of June, Felicia’s postcards began to be a little more chatty. She told Phoebe how much fun she was having, almost as if they were on good terms. “She sounds like a reasonable person to me,” Brock said when he read one. But it was unlike Mom and it worried Phoebe. She couldn’t be getting homesick, could she? Maybe she missed her parakeet. When Brock suggested again that maybe she was beginning to miss her daughter, Phoebe just laughed.

Now that she was married to Brock (who made Fifty dollars an hour with limited overhead) and had his car to drive, life was easier. More and more of her pay-check went into keeping Mom on the other side of the Atlantic, though it sorely rankled because she knew Felicia’s Social Security checks were being automatically deposited all the time and she was accumulating a bundle of her own. But it couldn’t go on forever, could it? How long could an American with a mouth on her go about the Middle East these days and stay out of trouble? She wondered if Mom could go to jail for hoarding those Social Security checks without reporting that her daughter was supporting her. Probably not. Other people, maybe, but not Felicia Hooks. Rotten apples seemed to have the most incredible luck.

June melted into July and July into August. Knowing from her postcards that Felicia was wandering around in that part of the world, Phoebe turned eagerly to the news each night to learn about the heightening tensions in the Persian Gulf. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait. The last card she’d had from Mom had come from Kuwait City. It was not a good place for an American to be.

She did not experience the joy she had thought she would. She kept picturing Good Old Mom at the mercy of those barbarians, and it made her stomach knot up in a tight little ball. Strange reaction.

So. Was Felicia Hooks one of the Americans who had been “detained” by the barbarians who had invaded Kuwait? Brock contacted the State Department with little success. All they learned was that her name was not on anyone’s list. But the postcards had stopped coming.

As the days of August ticked away, the big guns seemed more concerned with keeping the barbarians out of Saudi Arabia than about what had already happened to little Kuwait. Phoebe didn’t like the situation at all. She had pictured Mom getting wiped out quickly and neatly and painlessly, not suffering through some long, drawn-out ordeal.

Phoebe and Brock had just come back from the supermarket one Saturday afternoon when the phone rang. Phoebe answered it.

“Damn you!” shrieked the unmistakable voice of Felicia Hooks. “Didn’t you get my card, Ugg-face?”

“Ma — Mom?” Phoebe gasped. Brock, who was just putting the groceries down on the kitchen table, looked at her with a startled expression. “Mom, where are you?”

“About fifteen miles away at the airport. You were supposed to pick me up, dummy!”

“We didn’t—”

“I had to leave most of my luggage at a hotel in Kuwait and make a break for it in the back of somebody’s lousy, beat-up old pickup wearing somebody’s lousy, fleabitten old native costume, and then I had a helluva time making the right connections to get home. And then what happens? You can’t even get to the airport on time.”

“But I didn’t know—”

“And now there’s a big thunderstorm headed our way. I can see big black clouds rolling in right now. You’d better get here fast, Ugg-face, seeing as how this is all your fault.”

“All right, all right, we’ll leave right now.”

Brock and Phoebe hurried out to the car and took off for the airport. The sick little knot in Phoebe’s stomach was replaced by the old familiar hot lump at the back of her throat. “She was just awful,” she told Brock. “Just as bad as ever. Still the same old name-calling, still Good Old Mom.”

“Well,” Brock said mildly, “she’s upset. That’s understandable, isn’t it, after what she’s probably been through in the last days?”

“Just you wait, Brock Weaver. You’re finally going to see Felicia Hooks flying her true colors.”

Brock just smiled. He undoubtedly felt that as soon as they got Good Old Mom home and rested she’d be a sweet little old lady who was, after all, grateful for the wonderful gift her daughter had given her.

But Phoebe knew better. These last few unfortunate days would by far outweigh all the other months when Mom had been having a wonderful time. Phoebe would be blamed for it. Not a day would go by when Felicia would forget to remind her daughter that it was her fault she had been in Kuwait when all hell broke loose. And Phoebe would have a heck of a time getting her to take another trip.

Why was it that thoroughly rotten apples like Felicia Hooks seemed to lead charmed lives? She could probably walk through the middle of a gun battle and not be harmed. She would probably live to be a hundred and ten.

Phoebe’s spirits had fallen about as low as they could go by the time Brock turned off the freeway at the airport exit. What can I do? she asked herself as big, sloppy raindrops began to shatter on the windshield. Now her paycheck would have to go into a nice apartment for Good Old Mom or else she’d be moving into their house and disrupting everything with her rattlesnake personality and her garish sofa cushions. Could her marriage survive Felicia Hooks? Phoebe doubted it.

Oh, if only she had been hatched! This business of having a mother like Felicia was the absolute pits. But what could she do? What could she do?

When they pulled into the loading zone at the terminal, it was raining hard. Phoebe could see Good Old Mom inside, just beyond a bank of double doors, standing amid a heap of luggage. She just sat there and looked dully at her mother through the rain-spattered window while a cloud of misery settled down over her.

“I’ll help with the luggage,” Brock said as he pulled the lever that opened their trunk.

“She told me she left most of it in Kuwait,” Phoebe muttered.

“Maybe she had left some excess baggage in Rome or someplace before that and picked it up on her way home. She must have accumulated a lot of it in — what? — eight, nine months?” Leaving the motor running, Brock got out of the car.

At that moment, Felicia spotted Phoebe. A smile and a wave after months of separation? Not on your life. She sent her daughter a look that could have curdled milk. It’s going to be worse than ever, Phoebe said to herself.

Brock dashed inside and introduced himself to Felicia. Phoebe could see her mouth moving rapidly, her hands gesturing angrily, as she ripped into her new son-in-law for something. Brock did not lose his composure. Smiling, he grabbed a couple of suitcases. Good Old Mom stood guard over the remaining luggage until Brock went back for another load and some more verbal abuse.

I should be helping, Phoebe told herself, but she didn’t move. She just sat and listened to the purr of the engine.

Brock loaded the trunk and started to fill the back seat behind Phoebe. As he went back for the last load, Felicia started for the car, a look of total disgust on her face. Shielding her hair from the rain with a magazine, she saw that she’d have to go around to the other side to get in because the curb side was filled with luggage. It amused Phoebe in a grim sort of way that Brock had overlooked that detail. He was usually so thoughtful.

The little pouches of discontent at the corners of Felicia’s mouth bulged as her cold gray eyes swept Phoebe once more. You married a clod, those eyes said as she stepped off the curb and crossed between their car and the one parked in front of it.

“All that money down the drain,” Phoebe moaned.

She shifted around so that her back was to the door, so she’d be facing her mother when she got in the back seat. She’d have a few seconds for a few crisp words before Brock joined them. She was going to tell her that he was a shrink who could have her committed if she didn’t behave herself. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea — perhaps not the best of ideas, but all she had, until—

Well, it was a small car and, somehow, just as Good Old Mom paused to wait for a taxi to pass, Phoebe’s knee — or something — must have hit the gearshift — or something — because it jumped forward suddenly, catching Felicia Hooks, slamming her violently into the car in front and holding her there in a crushing grip.

“Oops,” said Phoebe.

Later, much later, after the police and the ambulance had gone, Brock drove Phoebe home. “It’s odd, isn’t it,” Phoebe said as they sped along, “how a car can be in an accident bad enough to kill someone and still be in working condition.”

“Yup,” Brock said goodnaturedly. “The front end’s a mess, though.”

“Imagine,” Phoebe said, sneaking a sly little look at Brock’s profile, “traveling all over the world like that and getting killed in her own back yard... so to speak.”

“Statistics say that most accidents occur within fifteen miles of home,” Brock said, his eyes on the road.

“Strange,” Phoebe said, “really strange.”

“Well,” Brock said, “maybe I shouldn’t have left the motor running.” Then he grinned at her and winked.

Phoebe sighed happily and moved as close to her husband as the bucket seats would allow. She put an arm around his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. It was so nice, she thought, being married to a man who knew her so well. So very, very nice.