“That can’t be good.”
“What?”
“Look.”
I looked. “Well, so, we burn it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t you ever spend any time with mom?”
“Aw – why do you have to bring mom into this?”
“This is her favorite pillowcase.”
“Mom is dead.”
“Don’t say it so –“
“But she’s dead.”
“Well, I can’t have her looking down from heaven at me, praying for me, and my soul, and I’m burning her pillowcase.”
“Jesus God damn.”
“Hey – I’m not so slight with her memory!”
“Freddy – Freddy, you just killed grandma. You suffocated her! Who the hell cares about a pillow case?”
“It was mom’s favorite!”
“Freddy – we just whacked her mother!”
“Yeah, and don’t tell me the old bitch didn’t deserve it, too!”
“Jesus God damn.”
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Clara picked up Vinny's laundry and stuffed into the empty pillowcase she found on the floor beside the bed. she balled up his wrinkled oxfords, his battered jeans and the cotton sweater with the pizza sauce on it and pushed them in on top of the torn tee shirts and wife-beaters she had found strewn around the room. She was upstairs doing his laundry. He was sacked out on the couch downstairs, dead tired. This was not what she had in mind when she said, I do. She pushed the discarded socks together into a pile with her foot, picked them up one at a time, holding them between the tip of her thumb and forefinger as if they were worms, and dropping them, one after the other into the pillowcase. Why did he have to leave the room like this? Still, she loved him. And besides he was so busy these days. So many business trips, so many meetings. Most of the time he was good enough to bring his clothes to the cleaners. But unfortunately, not today. With a hangar she hooked the underwear strewn across the floor,and began to drop them into the rapidly - filling pillow case. They were yellowed; sweat stained, like so much of his clothing; he did have a perspiration problem. Nerves, he always said. What did he have to be nervous about?, she always wondered. It was then that she saw it. She would have missed it normally, tossing the clothes into the machine: A lipstick kiss, pale pink, right smack dead center of the front of a pair of his briefs. She stood there for a moment, staring at it like it were some strange fish she had hauled up by that hangar hook from the depths. But then suddenly all the business trips, the late night meetings, the extra work, and the fatigue, made perfect sense. She stood there for a moment her eyes wide with thought. She knew what she would do. Then she put the underwear into the pillowcase, and it on the bed. She reached across the bed to the other side where there was another pillow. She carefully removed the pillow from the case. She placed the naked pillow under her arm, and went to the dresser where her husband kept the revolver. She wrapped the pillow case around her hand holing the gun, folded the pillow over it, and went downstairs where her husband was napping. This would be a bit messy, she thought, but since she was already doing the laundry . . .
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