Another Encounter with Mrs Hudnall

       “Summer vacation in another couple of weeks!’ Brian said triumphantly as they were on their way to the library. “I can’t wait!”

       Katie’s heart sank. Brian had been talking about visiting his cousins in Nebraska for weeks. She knew how excited he was, but how bored she would be while he was gone!

       All of a sudden she heard Brian mutter “Oh no, now we’re in for it.”  She turned to stare at him.     

       Brian gestured grimly; Katie turned to look, and saw the old lady in her wheelchair. She was holding something in her hand – something purple. The skin around her mouth was stained purple, too.

       “Hey, you two,” she called shrilly. Really, thought Katie, she had appalling manners.

       “Come here,” shrieked the woman. “I want to talk to you!” She glanced furtively back at the house.

        “Ignore her,” whispered Brian. “She’s nuts.”         

         But the woman’s wheelchair was much closer to the street this time, and Katie and Brian found themselves stopping almost against their own will.  Katie stared at the purple thing on a stick that the woman was holding.  What was it?

       “Popsicle,” cackled the woman, as if she’d read Katie’s mind.

       Brian and Katie eyed the rapidly melting popsicle. A thin trickle of purple juice was running down the woman’s knobby wrist. She lifted her hand to her mouth and licked her wrist, then bent her neck back and dangled the popsicle over her mouth so that the juice ran into it. Then she began to lick the sides and bottom of it.  Katie and Brian exchanged wary looks.

       “Getting so damn hot anymore, only way I can keep cool is eatin’ popsicles,” the woman stated. Then she eyed Katie again, hard.

       “You ask your mama if she was a witch?”

        “No,” Katie managed to mutter, aghast.

       The woman chuckled nastily to herself. “Go on,” she continued, “you ask her. Like to know what she says.”  She grunted and flicked her tongue at her popsicle.

       Katie stared at her in mortification.

       Brian stepped forward. “You shouldn’t talk about someone’s mother like that. It isn’t nice.” His voice was loud and clear. “In fact, it’s really rude.”

       The woman laughed at him. “Oh, I’m rude, am I? How about that witch, that girl’s mother?” She pointed a bony finger at Katie, and she said the word ‘mother’ as though it was something nasty. “She’s evil. Well, of course she is – she’s a witch. We kids called her that back then, and we were right.  Just look at her! Looks way younger than Princess, and Princess is my daughter. Hell, she looks younger than my grandkids! You think about that. She was old when I was a kid but now she looks younger than my grandkids. She’s a witch alright. You wait and see. Pretty soon she’ll be looking younger than Estelle, that’s my great-grandkid –” she glanced furtively at the house again, then hissed out the words in a hoarse staccato:  “Now, that’s not natural!”

       The woman had worked herself into a rage; pockets of white foam had formed in the corners of her mouth, the purple popsicle had melted into a slender cone;  juice from it flowed in a thin purple stream down her arm.  Suddenly the door slammed open and the same woman who had rescued them the last time came bounding out. She looked furious.

       “Grandma, you get your bee-hind back in here this instant!” she roared, making her way down the driveway toward them.

       Her grandmother turned and stared defiantly back at her. Then she turned back to Katie and Brian. “Ask her,” she hissed, “Ask your mama about Arlene Hudnall, used to live next door to her.”

       The woman’s granddaughter grabbed the handles of the wheelchair. Cursing, she pushed her grandmother back into the house. Katie and Brian could hear the younger woman swearing even after the door had been slammed shut.

       “Don’t ask me what those words mean! She knows ones I’ve never even heard,” said Brian with a grin, but his face was still white. Like Katie, he had been deeply shocked.

       “Shoot! We’re not going to have enough time at the library, now” he said.

        Katie didn’t answer, and Brian sighed.

       “Hey, Katie. Are we dumb or something? How come we even pay any attention to her? How come we had to stop and listen to her?”

       “She’s a grown-up. You’re supposed to be polite.” 

       “Yeah, well, we don’t have to be polite to crazy, mean adults. And she’s one of them for sure. Next time, we just act like we didn’t hear her. Or we go another way. Okay?”

       “Okay,” replied Katie dully. She felt sick.

       “Hey, you don’t believe her, do you? She’s just crazy, that’s all. I mean, eating a popsicle like that, letting it melt all down your arm. That’s weird. Nobody normal would do that.”

       Katie shrugged, but her heart was still racing. Was her mother really that old?

       “That stupid old woman. She’s the witch,” he said vehemently. “She only knows how to yell at kids and hurt people’s feelings. She can’t dry up someone’s blisters or cure their backache or take away their earache. Her own granddaughter doesn’t even seem to like her. Come on, Katie, you can’t take her seriously. I like your mom.” This was really kind of Brian; he didn’t even know her mother.  Katie frowned. Neither did she.

Another Encounter with Mrs Posey

        They had only just left the library when they heard someone calling them. Katie saw her first:  Mrs Posey.

        Brian let out a strangled groan. “Oh, man! It’s like we have a big sign stuck to us somewhere, ‘OBNOXIOUS ADULTS: PLEASE BOTHER THESE TWO KIDS.’ Katie giggled despite herself. It was funny to see Mrs Posey making her way towards them in her flowered sundress and red high heels, a pleasant look on her face, unaware that she was being called obnoxious.

       “Listen, guys, I just had to tell you – sorry, Brian, what is your friend’s name…?”

       Brian looked at Katie and sighed. “Katie.”

       “How sweet. Katie what?”

       Katie looked at her. “Just Katie,” she replied.

       “No, no, I mean, what’s your last name?” said Mrs Posey.

       Once again, Katie stared back at her. “Um – I’m not – I think it’s Galen. Katie Galen.”

       There was a stunned silence. Then Mrs Posey smiled brightly at her. “How do you spell that?”

         Katie bit her lip. “I’m not sure, really. With an E I think…”

         Mrs Posey stared back at her in amazement. “I promise not to go looking up your telephone number in the directory!” She smiled again and looked expectantly at Katie.

       Katie licked her lips and looked back at her. “We don’t have a telephone number.”

       Mrs Posey stared hard at Katie, and for once she did not have a smile on her face. She looked at Katie as though she was positive that she was lying. Finally she said, staring at the stack of books Katie was clutching,  “But surely…you do have a library card, don’t you?”

       “Yes,” answered Katie nervously.

       “Mind if I take a look at it?”

       Katie glanced at Brian, who looked deeply affronted. But she reached into the pocket of her jumper and produced her library card. Mrs Posey took it from her and squinted at it. “Katie Galen,” she read. “G-A-L-E-N.” She said this triumphantly, as though she had caught Katie out in a lie.

       “Please, can I have my library card back?” said Katie. For an awful moment she had feared that Mrs Posey might try and keep it out of mean-spiritedness. As Brian said, with adults sometimes you never knew.

       Mrs Posey handed back the card and Katie looked at it herself. She had looked at it at least a hundred times already, she had studied it carefully, and for some reason, she had never really noticed the word “Galen” after her own name. But there it was. “Ms Katie Galen.”  She supposed she had thought that it was some sort of extraneous title, like the ‘Ms’.’ If she had thought anything about it at all. There were other odd things on the card that she hadn’t yet asked about:  a lot of black stripes and lots of numbers.

       Mrs Posey glanced at her wristwatch and gave a little gasp, “But I am late!” she cried. “Must  run – hope I see you again…soon!” And she was gone.

       Brian gave her a quizzical look. “How come you didn’t know how to spell your last name? You really did know, didn’t you? Hey, I don’t blame you for not wanting to tell her anything. I wish she didn’t know my last name.”

       Katie looked at him thoughtfully. “I really wasn’t sure. Honest. I guess I seem pretty weird to you.”

       “Not weird, unusual.” Brian paused. “I am too, you know,” he added shyly.

       Katie grinned at him. “You ride in cars. You go to school. You know how to spell your last name. What’s unusual about you?”

       Brian ticked the reasons off on his hands. “One, my mom won’t let me watch television; we don’t even have one. Two, she doesn’t buy me hamburgers or any kind of fast food, which she says is junk to keep the masses undernourished, three, she thinks toy guns will turn me into a killer, and four, if I say I want something because everybody else has it, I can forget about her ever getting it for me. That makes me weird. Plus, number five, I don’t have any friends. Except you.” He said the last words lightly, but Katie could tell that it was something he did not take lightly at all.  She looked at him in amazement.

       “Really?” She was genuinely surprised. Brian was so nice he ought to have hundreds of friends.

       “Mm, really.” answered Brian. “I hope you won’t stop being my friend, now that you know that.” He said this as though it was a joke, but Katie knew it wasn’t.

       “I won’t ever stop being your friend,” she answered stoutly.

       For a while they walked along together without talking.  Then Brian spoke again.

       “Tell me one thing, though, about you and your mom…”

       “What?”

       “Well, if you never talk to each other, how come you know how to talk?  My mom says that if no one talks to you when you’re a little kid, you don’t learn how to talk properly.”

       Katie pondered this. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I can’t remember learning to talk. My mother used to talk to me when I was little – I know she did. But I can’t remember what we talked about. I used to ask her lots of questions, and she always answered them, I’m sure.  I’d ask her about cars and flowers and people and things. And she does talk sometimes. But it’s just not enough. I want to talk all the time, and she doesn’t. She doesn’t seem to need to talk, but I do. I always have words in my head, and I always wish I could talk to someone when I don’t understand things, or when I feel sad.”

       “Well, you can always talk to me, ‘cause I’m crazy about talking,” said Brian.

       “I know,” said Katie.