The Tommyknockers

She had put the funeral and interment off yet another day.

The relatives began to rumble, but A

She could not delay the funeral another day longer and she knew it. Bobbi had won this battle; all right, so be it. But not the war. Oh no. If she thought that, the bitch had several more thinks coming-and all of them would be painful.

A

She would have flown to Bangor the following day-that was when the ticket was for-but her idiotic mother fell down the back stairs and broke her hip. Sean O'Casey had once said that when you lived with the Irish you marched in a fool's parade, and oh how right he had been. Her mother's screams brought A

In that angry, dismayed moment A

But you won't, she had thought, going to the phone. You won't; if I want a thing to be, if I mean a thing to be, that thing will be; I am going to Haven and I am going to cut a wide swath there. I'm going to bring Bobbi back, and they're going to remember me for a long time. Especially the hayseed dork who hung up on me.

She picked up the phone and punched the Medix number-it had been pasted to the phone ever since her father's first stroke-with quick, angry stabs of her forefinger. She was grinding her teeth.

Thus it was the ninth of August before she could finally get away. In the caesura, there was no call from Bobbi, and A

Now she was here, in Bangor's Cityscape Hotel, sleeping badly… and grinding her teeth.

She had always ground her teeth. Sometimes it was so loud it awoke her mother in the night… on a few occasions even her father, who slept like a brick. Her mother mentioned it to the family doctor when A

“If I am, it must be catching,” Paula had said. “My husband's heard it, too.”

They looked toward A

“She also does that in her sleep?” the doctor asked.

Paula Anderson nodded.

“Well, it'll probably go away,” the doctor said. “It's harmless.” But of course it didn't go away and it wasn't harmless; it was bruxism, a malady which, along with heart attacks, strokes, and ulcers, often afflicts driven, self-assertive people. The first of A

The family dentist had noticed the problem wasn't going away but getting worse by the time A

She had wanted gold, but that really was beyond their means.

For several years thereafter, A

Bruxism aside, A

In the last two years she had begun to lose teeth in spite of her fanatic efforts to save them: two on the top right, three on the bottom left. In both cases she had opted for the most expensive dental bridgework available-she had to travel to New York City to have the work done. The dental surgeon removed the rotting husks, flayed her gums to the dull white of the jawbone, and implanted tiny titanium screws. The gums were sewn back together and healed nicely-some people reject metal implants in the bone, but A