Page 33 of The Corruption of Hollis Brown

Why are you doing this stuff? Hollis asked after a silent hour of work.

He got back a frisson of an emotion from Walt that he couldn’t name. Frustration and something else.

All you people love doing is buying new things. People used to fix what they owned, maintained it. We worked longer hours too.

Walt tightened a screw on their kitchen cabinet, then shook it to make sure it stuck.

You need to start mending your clothes when they tear or get worn.

I don’t know how to sew. You have no idea how creepy it was watching you do that.

You should learn. It’s not hard. Everyone should know how to sew, knit, or crochet, darn, and do some basic tailoring. How can you look your best without it? What if you couldn’t afford warm things for the winter? A few balls of yarn are cheap in the summer but priceless in the winter months.

I’m not fucking . . . Laura Ingalls Wilder, Hollis spat.

Walt laughed dryly.

I’m surprised you even know who that is.

Hum

Walt stopped working whenever Hollis’s ma appeared. He didn’t seem to want her to know what he was doing. As if she would just not notice that her house was cleaner and better than it was earlier in the day.

Walt opened their kitchen pantry and just stared at it.

What now? Not organized well enough for His Royal Highness?

If Hollis could feel his arms well enough to fold them, he would.

Walt reached out and dragged his fingers across the labels, then picked up a jar of pickled asparagus.

You’re still doing this here . . . ? he said.

Everyone does it. We have a supermarket, of course, but who wants to rely on that all the time? It’s cheaper to make and grow stuff and share with each other. Should be familiar to an ancient demon like yourself.

Walt was using Hollis’s face to frown. He made a soft mournful sound and hung his head.

Don’t worry. Along with Little House on the Prairie, I’ve also read The Jungle. You can close the pantry and walk away if it’s too traumatizing for you to look at, Hollis said meanly.

Walt gripped the side of the pantry hard enough to hurt, then he put the asparagus back down.

You don’t know what it was like. If you did, it would never occur to you to be cruel.

Walt closed the pantry doors like he was closing the doors to a church.

Torn

After dinner, Yulia came by.

Walt had cooked. Focused on Hollis’s apparently “insufficient protein intake,” he made some rice-and-beans concoction with dried peppers and onions. He’d started back up the tedious work of fixing Hollis’s clothes when she rang their doorbell.

Neither Yulia nor Annie texted before they came over most of the time, so it wasn’t entirely surprising.

But Hollis had been so tied up in all of t h i s that it hadn’t occurred to him to talk to Walt about how to act around his friends. If he didn’t have the power to grab his body back and beg for help, at least he could have come up with some kind of contingency plan. But between arguing with Walt internally, and the six hours of manual labor Walt had forced them into, Hollis had completely forgotten.

Hollis begged, screaming, for Walt to just ignore her, but Walt walked them downstairs and opened the door anyway.

Yulia didn’t wait to say hi. She immediately pulled them into a tight hug, rocking them back and forth the way she liked to after it had been too long since they’d seen each other.