"You just can't give up, can you," said the woman.
Step glanced up, trying to see whom she was talking to. She was looking at him.
Did he even know her? She looked familiar, but he couldn't place her.
"At Kroger's, at the mall, I turn around and there you are. Can't you give me any peace?"
Step was baffled. "Excuse me, but I think you have me confused with somebody else."
"Wasn't giving up my job enough for you? Are you trying to hound me into suicide?" Her voice trembled; she sounded genuinely distraught. Whatever she imagined he was doing seemed real enough to her, though he could not think of why she would have fixated on him.
"Ma'am, nobody wants you to commit suicide."
"Then just stop it," she hissed.
Suddenly he made the connection. She hadn't chosen him out of madness; she really had given up her job because of him.
"Mrs. Jones," he said.
"You're a vile man," she said. "Whatever I did, I don't deserve to have you stalking me."
"I'm not, I swear it. This is the first time I've set eyes on you since--"
"Don't lie to me," she said contemptuously. "You every time. At the mall you laughed out lo ud at me."
"Mrs. Jones, how would I know you'd even be at Macy's? I'm here picking up a prescription for my wife."
"I won't go on with that tape hanging over my I won't. It's worse than blackmail, it's torture."
It sickened him to have her, Stevie's tormentor, complaining about torture. But he didn't want to argue with her. She was a closed chapter. "Listen, Mrs. Jones. I just brought my wife home from the hospital and our newborn baby is still there because nobody knows why he's having seizures but he's in intensive care at a hundred dollars an hour and I don't have insurance and the bank is foreclosing on our house in Indiana and you know something? I don't care about you. I'm not following you. I'm living my own life, and you go live yours and forget about me, because until this moment I had completely forgotten about you and I'd just as soon leave it that way"
He turned to go back to the pharmacist's counter. She snatched at his sleeve. "Give me the tape," she said.
"I don't even remember where it is," Step said. "Look, Mrs. Jones, we both live in the same town. We're bound to end up in the same store or me same fast-food joint or the same movie every now and then, and it doesn't mean anything."
"Is that how you plan to defend yourself when I ask the court for a restraining order?" she said. "That's what my lawyer suggests."
"Right now I think my prescription is ready and my wife needs it. Have your lawyer write me a letter." If there was a lawyer.
He picked up the prescription, had the clerk put it on his account at the store, and left. He was half afraid that Mrs. Jones would follow him out of the store, chase him all the way home, and beat on his door, insisting that he had to stop following her. But when he returned home with the medication, the only people who knocked on the door were more Relief Society sisters, coming by to help encourage DeAnne about Zap. Whatever happens will be part of Heavenly Father's plan, they said. After they left, DeAnne couldn't help but voice her exasperation to Step and Vette. "Of course it'll be part of God's plan, but God hasn't exactly been famous for planning nice things for all of his children."
Even though she was annoyed, Step could see that their visit had been good for her. In familiar surroundings, some parts of her life seemed finally to be under control again. She was back to being Relief Society spiritual living teacher instead of a helpless mother trapped in a hospital surrounded by doctors who didn't know what they were doing with her baby and wouldn't admit it.
On Monday morning, DeAnne arranged for Mary Anne Lowe to come over and tend Robbie and Betsy so that Step could take Stevie to the psychiatrist while Vette took DeAnne to the hospital to nurse Zap.
"We've been taking him to Dr. Weeks for two months," said Step. "Nothing's getting better."
"I know," said DeAnne. "But these things take time."
"After two months, we deserve a progress report," said Step. "We ought to be getting at least a diagnosis.
Something. I mean, we're going through the same thing with Zap, the doctors searching to try to find out what's wrong, but they at least keep us posted. They explain what they're doing. And they learn things about the baby every day-at least they learn what isn't wrong with him."
"Psychiatry isn't precise," said DeAnne.
"Exactly my point. The hospital bill is already getting up around six thousand dollars for Zap alone, and who knows how much longer he'll be in there? We're putting in ninety bucks a week to the shrink-almost four hundred a month, almost as much as we're paying in rent-and we don't know what we're getting."
"So you don't want to take him? You want to give up? Stop cold?"
"I want to leave him home today. I want to go in myself, talk to her, find out what she's been finding out."
DeAnne looked at him suspiciously. "I think you want to pick a fight with her. I think you want to get rid of her the way you got rid of Mrs. Jones."
"If you want, I'll take the tape recorder and let you hear everything that's said."
"No," said DeAnne. "You can handle it."
"I promise that I won't do anything to antagonize her," said Step. "I wouldn't want to make it harder for Lee to continue in the Church."
"Or for Stevie to continue seeing her," said DeAnne.
"If that's in Stevie's best interest," said Step.
DeAnne just stood there, looking at him.
"I'm glad you decided not to say it," said Step.
"Say what?" asked DeAnne.
"That you don't think I'm capable of fairly evaluating whether Stevie should continue or not."
"That's not what I was going to say."
"No, but it's what you were thinking."
"Well, you can't get mad at me for what I thought and didn't say!"
"I'm not mad at you. I'm just reminding you that in all our years of marriage, I've never snuck off and done something about our family that you were against. Have I?"
"No," she said.
"So maybe I deserve a little trust here. You're not the only parent Stevie has who loves him."
"That is so unfair," she said. "I never said that, I never thought it, I never would—"
"I actually go through every day doing pretty well, DeAnne. I dress myself now, I carry on whole conversations with strangers, and I almost never have to call home for help. I've even used a credit card without confusion, and the grocery store lets me cash checks as long as I have a permission slip from my mother."
"Are you trying to make me cry?" asked DeAnne. "Are you trying to make me feel guilty because this is the first time you've taken Stevie to Dr. Weeks and I worry that you'll do something or say something to-"
"You see?" said Step. "You really don't trust me. For five months you've been in charge of everything at home, and now I'm back home again and you think that unless you program every word I say, unless I stick to your program every single moment, without deviation, without side trips, without thinking for myself, then everything will fall apart."
"Let's not fight," she said. "Please, please, please."
"We're not fighting," said Step. "I'm just expressing my resent ment about the fact that you don't trust my judgment. Don't you remember that we decided together to send Stevie to Dr. Weeks? Or do you still think it was because you manipulated me into it and you don't dare let up on the manipulation?"
"Don't do this to me!" she said. "I have to go up there to the hospital and hold my baby who is so drugged up that he hangs like a rag doll in my arms and we have to suction the milk out of my breasts and force it into his throat in his sleep! I have to deal with all those doctors who think that I can't even understand English and force them to tell me what's going on so that I can have some idea of what's happening to my baby, and now you attack me like this—"