The Lesson of Her Death

skin-creepy wasp nest that has weighed on his mind like a fat pimple for a week. After he kills his father and after he kills Jano the Honon traitor he will fire the rest of the bullets into the wasp nest.
    Lock on target, entering Dimensional shift now
.…
    No, Philip remembers, he will not shoot all the bullets into the nest. He’ll save one.
    Philip steps out of the woods and starts toward his house.
    Faith. To the Lost Dimension. From darkness to light
.

“D oing that,” Creth Halpern said, “won’t help much at all.”
    His wife looked at him curiously—as if he hadn’t spoken, as if he were simply standing in front of her, moving his mouth silently. As if the words buzzed around her head like bees in an old cartoon.
    They were both surprised at his comment. It had been years since he’d referred to her drinking. His wife emptied the contents of the heavy glass into her throat and swallowed. She poured another and replaced the plastic pitcher in a refrigerator that held Kraft cheese slices, a near-empty box of Post Toasties, a package of gray ground beef, a half quart of milk. She leaned against the wall. Halpern gripped the screwdriver he was using to crack open a paint-frozen window. He dug the blade into the seam and levered upward, crushing the wood of the sill. The window didn’t budge. “Damn.”
    His wife sipped the drink and looked out at ablooming lilac bush outside windows bordered with curtains on which were printed tiny brown tepees.
    Halpern for the life of him couldn’t understand why she looked so good. In the mornings, a little puffy-faced; at night, eyes dead to all who bothered to look. But that was the only real evidence. Last summer one of Philip’s friends had hit on her. A skin-and-bones high school kid! Halpern admitted she had a great bod. How could she pour down the Beefeaters faster than any one of the guys down at the Tap and still keep her face clean and her hair all permed up nice? Her nails done? Her legs shaved?
    “Our son,” she said by way of announcement, “in jail.”
    “He didn’t do it. He’ll be out tomorrow.”
    “Oh, come on. He did those
things
to her.…” She didn’t even sound drunk. He wondered if he’d just gotten used to it. He tried to remember her voice when he’d met her, when he’d first started hanging out in the New Lebanon Inn, where she was waitressing. He couldn’t. This saddened him greatly.
    His wife said to a lumber yard calendar, “I can’t call my mother. How can I call her? I’d be so ashamed.”
    “He did some things to that girl, yeah, and he oughta be whipped and he will be. But he didn’t kill anybody. I’ll swear to that. What we should do is get some help.”
    “Oh, sure. How?”
    “There’s state help, I guess. Talk to a … I don’t know. Somebody.”
    “Oh, just like that? Sure. If you made money maybe.” Her voice clear as gin.
    “I put a roof over his head. I put food in his mouth. And yours too. Food, and that’s not all.” Two digs in one day. Halpern was shaken.
    “If you made money—”
    “I fucking make money. You could make money too.”
    “—we could do a few things.”
    “I’m stopping you from getting a job?”
    “You don’t remember. You don’t remember anything.”
    Halpern said, “I can’t talk to you when you’re this way.”
    “How come,” she asked curiously, “you don’t fuck me anymore?”
    Halpern’s temper blazed then died immediately to a simmer. He considered open-handing her cheek but was paralyzed by a bottomless remorse. He joined his wife in gazing out the window. It occurred to him that most of their arguments happened just this way—her drunk, him thinking about other places and people, both of them staring out the window. Wanting to smack her and not having the energy or the type of hate required.
    “Oh, go to hell,” his wife said as if giving directions.
    Halpern snatched up the screwdriver. He squeezed it a dozen times, feeling the resilience of the rubberized handle spattered in paint. He stepped slowly to the kitchen sink, leaned forward and dug the screwdriver furiously into the seam of the window, cracking chunks out of the soft pine sill.
    He heard a clatter of pans behind him.
    He heard the sticky sound of the refrigerator door opening.
    He heard the sound of pouring liquid.
    He heard his wife’s voice. “Philip!”
    Halpern turned. The boy had entered through the back door and stood in the center of the kitchen.
    “When d’you get