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you wait on her. Sarah, I don't see how you put up with it, making you wait on her like you was paid forty dollars a week to do it, and she don't do a thing all day long while you and me are twisting our fingers off at the plant. I see you at night, and I know you do the laundry, I see you hanging out your sheets by the light of the moon, and I tell you, I don't see why you put up with it! She' s not your mama, she's Dean' s m ama, and that' s not the same thing at all.'
    'Well', said Sarah, 'she does let me live there rent free.'
    'Honey', replied Becca, 'besides the fact that you buy all the food, she'd have to pay me to live in that house with her. Don't seem like I have ever seen her standing on them two fat ankles of hers.'
    Sarah laughed and felt better about her lot.
    Becca Blair was religious, but hers was a strange religion of fear and superstition; she wore charms about her neck, and was afraid to step out of the house on certain days, and lay shivering in bed at night with the fear of evil spirits in the pantry. There were partitions, about shoulder high, that separated the women on the assembly line. This was to keep them from talking to one another, supposedly; though sustained conversation was impossible anyway, because of the noise of the machinery and the conveyer belt. But on these partitions Becca had placed, with pins and thumbtacks and nails, numerous Catholic artifacts: lithographed cards, a couple of rosaries, and even a tiny vitrine with a figure of the Pieta surmounting a crude copy of Da Vinci's 'The Last Supper'. 'I tell you, Sarah, I tell you something', Becca would sometimes whisper to her friend, 'I'm scared as hell of going to hell.' But she was never strong enough to give up her men or her weekend six-pack of beer for that fear, and she listened gratefully when Sarah would try to convince her that there were worse things than men and beer: 'Like being mean, like being mean at the heart, like Jo Howell.'
    Sarah Howell had no car, which is a considerable hardship in a place like Alabama, which sets great store by automobiles, and where the possession of one is not deemed a luxury, but an absolute necessity. The supermarket does not make deliveries in Pine Cone, there is no public transit system, and no taxi service since 1937 (and it had been a failure anda joke even then). In the newer parts of town, the municipal government had not even bothered to put in sidewalks, for who walked? Schoolchildren, perhaps, when they lived not more than a block or so from the school, and even then only in the finest weather.
    Dean and Sarah had had a car when they married, of course, and they had ridden in it down to Pan am a City, Florida, for their honeymoon. They stayed in a miserable little cottage in a complex of many such small run-down buildings collectively called the Bide-A-Wee Inn. The Bide-A-Wee was not very expensive, and it was just across the highway from the Gulf of Mexico and Dean and Sarah had enjoyed themselves very much, walking up and down the beach and fishing off the great pier. At night, they played carpet golf or lost themselves in an arcade that boasted over a hundred and fifty pinball machines. A mechanised gypsy in a glass case had pointed to the jack of clubs with a broken finger and then promised Sarah a long life, ample fortune, and many friends.
    The 1959 Ford Country Squire station wagon got them to Florida and it got them back to Pine Cone; it lasted through the first ten months of their marriage and would probably have seen Sarah through the three years that Dean was scheduled to be away from her had he not smashed it to junk the night before he was to leave for Fort Rucca. He was drunk, in the company of two young men who were not going into the army, and, driving without headlights, had ploughed into a fence post about eight miles outside of town, on property belonging to Jack Weaver, a not-very-prosperous pig farmer. Mr Weaver was understanding when he learned that Dean was to