Well, that made sense too, from what Jennie said. Funny, she had never thought what a weapon words could be, until Jennie pointed it out. Words could hurt worse than knives, because they cut you where it didn’t show.

On the outside. On the outside.

She had begun thinking over things, in the leisure granted her by Jennie’s willingness to pitch in and help. She often had as much as an hour or two, now, when she could just sit and think, and a lot of her thoughts were very uncomfortable.

She had to admit, if only to herself, that Rod never had been the Prince Charming she’d thought. In fact, in a lot of ways, he was more like Ivan the Terrible. But she’d been so busy, what with one thing and another, that she’d never really thought about how she was less his wife and more like his housekeeper, errand-runner, and—

Admit it, Toni. Punching bag.

That was how Jennie, detached, but compassionate, had described some of her clients, women she had met at the Women’s Shelter or women she had taken there. They were punching bags for their husbands, she’d said, sighing. Whenever something went wrong for the man, he came home and took it out on her or the kids, or both. I mean, in a way I can almost understand it. These guys all had nowhere to go, no way to express their anger and frustration, and their wives were the only creatures they knew weaker and less powerful than they were. It’s like chickens in a chicken house; the big chickens pick on the littler ones, and so on down the line, until it comes to the last chicken in the chicken house, who gets abuse from everybody. But that doesn’t make it right. People aren’t chickens. People know better.

Uncomfortable thinking.

She’d asked Toni about what she’d done before she married Rod; pointed out that she could still make a living for herself, even if Rod wasn’t there. That was something that hadn’t occurred to her in ages, and Toni had started to wonder just what life would be like without Rod around.

Jennie was a pretty smart cookie, when it came down to it. Everything she said made sense.

She’d said other things too; things that were beginning to make Toni wonder about being crazy or not. She had a lot of funny, and sometimes not-so-funny, stories about people who’d seen what she called Spirits, things that weren’t necessarily ghosts, but certainly weren’t physical. And what Jennie said about the Spirits sure matched those Indians Toni kept seeing. …