“Tell her she may be a hole, but you’re no post,” Rose said. “Tell her you’ll tickle her ass if she’ll whistle ‘Old Black Joe’.”

She gave Lennie a shove. It knocked him clean out the door and off the porch, and he landed sprawling in the yard.

He picked himself up, blubbering and rubbing his eyes. Rose gave him a final cussing, accusing him and Myra of a whole blast of dirty things. It kind of made me wince to listen to her, it was that dirty. What she’d said before sounded downright complimentary by comparison.

She came back in, slamming the door. I gave her a hug, and told her she’d done just fine.

“Now, are you beginnin’ to get the picture?” I said. “Lennie never leaves town. He’s not only too danged lazy to do any real walkin’, but he’s scared to get very far off by himself. Myra knows this. She knows he’d be just about as likely to flap his arms and fly as he would to come way out here to your place. So what happens when he goes home and tells Myra he has been out here?”

Rose said, “Mmm,” nodding her head slowly. “She probably won’t believe him, right? But what—”

“She won’t believe him,” I said. “Leastways, she’ll have some awful strong doubts he’s telling the truth. Then, he tells her all the dirty things you said about her, about her and Lennie sleepin’ together and so on. And how can she believe that? How can she believe that her very best friend, a perfect lady, would all of a sudden start talking dirty about her?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Rose nodded again. “She can’t believe that he came out here, in the first place, and she can’t believe what he says happened here. The way she sees it, he’ll just have made it all up, and he’ll probably get his ears boxed for lying. But—”

“Not just lying,” I said, “but god-danged dangerous lyin’. The kind that breaks up homes, and gets people killed. And Myra won’t want to chance the risk of it happening again. She’ll figure he’s taken a real bad turn for the worse, and she’ll have to put him away somewhere hike she’s sometimes threatened to.”

“Huh!” Rose gave me a startled look. “When did Myra ever do anything hike that? Why she can hardly bear to let Lennie out of her sight!”

I said Myra had threatened to put him away a couple times, when she got extra mad at him, and, yeah, she couldn’t hardly bear to let Lennie out of sight. “That’s why she’s never done anything about him, because she’d want to be with him wherever he was and she didn’t want to heave Pottsville. Now, though, she’s got no choice. He goes and she goes, too.”

Rose said she just wasn’t sure about it. It sounded good but you couldn’t depend on it working out that way. I said that, well, of course we’d have to help things along a little.