OCR Text |
Show 81 them only when Rod's wife is also there. Earlier, there had been talk of retirement communities or perhaps rest homes; now the talk is of hospitalization. "If you let them put you in there you'll never get out," Luel's child had said to her once. "You'd go crazy." "I don't think the hospitals are as primitive as that," Annis says gently, but she knows somehow the girl is right: hospitalization, whether for mental or physical distress, is the last thing she wants, when all she wants is peace, tranquility, a surcease of activity, a final stilling of her world. "That's what they want to do with you, you know," the child insists. "I've heard them talking." "So have I." Annis says it with her usual composure, but she can feel that composure disturbed: she feels a new urgency, a fear, a claustrophobic, confined feeling, as if the bars of a cage were being nailed up around her one by one. But Rod sees them talking, and sends Luel's kid to her room. "You shouldn't upset your grandmother," he says. "She needs rest." The girl turns, flips her long hair insolently at him, slides off down the hall. "That girl's been here long enough," Rod says to his brother. "She ought to be home with her father." "I think she feels this js_ her home, as much as she has one any more." "It's not good for her. It's not good to be around these crazy old people, not for a child like that. I'm going to tell her to go." |