From the Corner of His Eye

wagering."
        "This isn't wagering," Grace declared.
        "That's right," Celestina told Wally. "This isn't wagering. What's wrong with you?"
        "If it isn't wagering," he wondered, "what is it?"
        Grace said, "Mother-and-daughter bonding."
        "Yeah. Bonding," Celestina agreed.
        The station wagon rolled out, the Volkswagen bus followed it, and Wally brought up the rear. "Wagons, ho!" he announced. The morning that it happened, Barty ate breakfast in the Lampion kitchen with Angel, Uncle Jacob, and two brainless friends.
        Jacob cooked corn bread, cheese-and-parsley omelettes, and crisp home fries with a dash of onion salt.
        The round table seated six, but they required only three chairs, because the two brainless friends were a pair of Angel's dolls.
        While Jacob ate, he browsed through a new coffee-table book on dam disasters. He talked more to himself than to Barty and Angel, as he spot-read the text and looked at pictures. "Oh, my," he would say in sonorous tones. Or sadly, sadly: "Oh, the horror of it." Or with indignation: "Criminal. Criminal that it was built so poorly." Sometimes he clucked his tongue in his cheek or sighed or groaned in commiseration.
        Being blind had few consolations, but Barty found that not being able to look at his uncles' files and books was one of them. In the past, he never really, in his heart, wanted to see those pictures of dead people roasted in theater fires and drowned bodies floating in flooded streets, but a few times he peeked. His mom would have been ashamed of him if she'd discovered his transgression. But the mystery of death had an undeniable creepy allure, and sometimes a good Father Brown detective story simply didn't satisfy his curiosity. He always regretted looking at those photos and reading the grim accounts of disaster, and now blindness spared him that regret.
        With Angel at breakfast, instead of just Uncle Jacob, at least Barty had someone to talk to, even if she did insist on speaking more often through her dolls than directly. Apparently, the dolls were on the table, propped up with bowls. The first, Miss Pixie Lee, had a high-pitched, squeaky voice. The second, Miss Velveeta Cheese, spoke in a three year-old's idea of what a throaty-voiced, sophisticated woman sounded like, although to Barty's ear, this was more suitable to a stuffed bear.
        "You look very, very handsome this morning, Mr. Barty, " squeaked Pixie Lee, who was something of a flirt. "You look like a big movie star "Are you enjoying your breakfast, Pixie Lee?"
        I wish we could have Kix or Cheerios with chocolate milk.
        "Well, Uncle Jacob doesn't understand kids. Anyway, this is pretty good stuff."
        Jacob grunted, but probably not because he'd heard what had been said about him, more likely because he'd just turned the page to find a photo of dead cattle piled up like driftwood against the American Legion Hall in some flood-ravaged town in Arkansas.
        Outside, engines fired up, and the pie caravan pulled out of the driveway.
        "In my home in Georgia, we eat Froot Loops with chocolate milk for dinner "
        "Everybody in your home must have the trots."
        "What're the trots?"
        "Diarrhea."
        "What's… dia… like you said?"
        "Nonstop, uncontrollable pooping."
        "You're gross, Mr. Barty. No one in Georgia has trots.
        Previously, Miss Pixie Lee had been from Texas, but Angel had recently heard that Georgia was famous for its peaches, which at once captured her imagination. Now Pixie Lee had a new life in a Georgia mansion carved out of a giant peach.
        "I ALWAYS EAT CAV-EE-JAR FOR BREAKFAST," said Velveeta Cheese in her stuffed-bear voice.
        "That's caviar," Barty corrected.
        "DON'T YOU TELL ME HOW TO SAY WORDS, MR. BARTY"
        "Okay, then, but you'll be an ignorant cheesehead."
        "AND I DRINK CHAMPAGNE ALL DAY," said Miss Cheese, pronouncing it "cham-pay-non."
        "I'd stay drunk, too, if my name was Velveeta Cheese."
        "You look very handsome with your new eyes, Mr. Barty, " Pixie Lee squeaked.
        His artificial eyes were almost a month old. He'd been through surgery to have the eye-moving muscles attached to the conjunctiva, and everybody told him that the look and movement were absolutely real. In fact, they had told him this so often, in the first week or two, that he became