One Door From Heaven

it, she yawned frequently while serving her customers, spoke in a disinterested mumble, moved in a foot-sliding slouch, and got their orders mixed up. When any mistake was called to her attention, she sighed as wearily as a waiting soul in Limbo who had been playing solitaire with an imaginary deck of cards since before three wise men carried gifts to Bethlehem by camel.
        Calculating that someone as terminally bored as Darvey might welcome a colorful encounter to relieve the tedium of her day, might actually listen, and might enjoy involvement in a real-life drama, Leilani spoke up when, at the end of lunch, the waitress arrived with the check: "They're going to take me up to Idaho, smash my skull with a hammer, and bury me in the woods."
        Darvey blinked as slowly as a lizard sunning on a rock.
        To Leilani, Preston Maddoc said, "Now, sweetie, be honest with the young lady. Your mother and I aren't hammer maniacs. We're ax maniacs. We aren't going to club you to death. It's our plan to chop you to pieces and feed you to the bears."
        "I'm entirely serious," Leilani told Darvey. "He killed my older brother and buried him in Montana."
        "Fed him to bears," Preston assured the waitress. "As we always do with difficult children."
        Sinsemilla affectionately ruffled her daughter's hair. "Oh, Lani baby, you are such a morbid child sometimes."
        The slowly, slowly blinking Darvey seemed to wait with coiled tongue for an unwary fly to buzz by.
        To this blond gecko, dear Mater said, "Her brother was actually abducted by aliens and is undergoing rehabilitation at their secret base on the dark side of the moon."
        "My mother really believes the alien crap," Leilani told Darvey, " 'cause she's a totally wrecked junkie who's had like a billion volts shot through her brain in electroshock therapy."
        Her mother rolled her eyes and made an electrical sound, "Zzzt, zzzt," and laughed, and made it again, "Zzzt, zzzt!"
        Playing the stern but loving father, Preston Maddoc said, "Lani, enough already. This isn't funny."
        Sinsemilla frowned disapprovingly at the pseudofather. "Oh, now, honey, it's all right. She's exercising her imagination. That's good. It's healthy. I don't believe in repressing children's creativity."
        To the waitress, Leilani said, "If you call the cops and swear you saw these two hit me, that'll start an investigation, and when it's all over, you'll be a hero. You'll be praised on America's Most Wanted and maybe even hugged on Oprah."
        Putting the lunch check on the table, Darvey said, "This is one of like a million reasons why I'm never having kids."
        "Oh, no, don't say that," Sinsemilla objected with deep feeling. "Darvey, don't deny yourself motherhood. It's such a natural high, and making a baby bonds you to the living earth like nothing else."
        "Yeah," the waitress said with yet another yawn, "it looks just totally fabulous."
        After Darvey shuffled away, as Preston put an extravagant tip on the table, Sinsemilla said, "Lani baby, this morbid thinking is what you get when you read too many trashy nonsense books about evil pigmen. You need some real literature to clear your head out."
        Here was advice from the matriarch of the new psychic humanity. And she was serious: Books that lied about the nobility of pigs, and portrayed these good animals as evil, corrupted Leilani's mind and spawned morbid, paranoid notions about what had happened to Lukipela.
        "You're amazing, Mother."
        Old Sinsemilla put an arm around Leilani and drew her close, squeezing too tightly with what passed, in her dementia, for motherly affection. "Sometimes you worry me, little Klonkinator." Of Preston, she inquired, "Do you think she might be a candidate for therapy?"
        "When the time comes, they'll heal her mind and her body both," he predicted. "To a superior extraterrestrial intelligence, the mind and the body are one entity."
        Appealing to Darvey for help had been a fiasco, not primarily because the waitress's skull bone was too thick to allow truth to resonate through it, but because for the first time, Leilani had revealed to Preston that she didn't believe his story about Lukipela being beamed up into the gentle caring hands of medicine men from Mars or Andromeda, and that she suspected him of committing murder. He might previously have sensed her suspicion, but now he