Free An Atomic Romance by Bobbie Ann Mason Page B

spirit. She had raised four children as a single parent.
    “How’s your mom doing, Reed?”
    “Better. But they’re wanting to put her in a nursing home, and I know she won’t go.” He explained about the rehab.
    “That’s a hard one. I’m really sorry about that. But they can probably help her.”
    “Yeah.”
    She folded the newspaper. “Reed, you watch out what they’re doing out at the plant,” she said, with concern. “There doesn’t seem to be any end to this.”
    “Oh, they take good care of me,” Reed said.
    “I see guys come in the store to cash their checks, and it’s pitiful what they make at some of these places around—like the sock factory and the plastics place? But at the atomic plant they always made really good.”
    “I can’t complain. I worked five twelves a week last month.” He grinned. “With time and a half, I’m rolling in it.”
    She was regarding him apprehensively.
    “Got to finish paying off my kids’ college,” he said.
    “Are you going to that meeting tonight?”
    “No, I’m on tonight. Anyway, I don’t think anybody can get a straight answer out of the government.”
    He gave Rosalyn a twenty and a five for his gas. She gave him a dollar and eighteen cents and dropped his receipt into the waste can. He pocketed his change, wadding the dollar down into his jeans.
    “I hope your mom is feeling better, Reed,” she said as he backed out the door with a wave. “Don’t eat any rutabagas!”
    Technetium could be used to keep iron from rusting, he thought as he turned the key in his car. He knew about the technetium. It had been there for years, and he didn’t want to think about it.
    At the light, an eighteen-wheeler was making a turn through the intersection, barely clearing Reed’s front end. Reed hit the horn a glancing blow, a slight warning bleep.
    He stopped at the Handy Gunner, a collectors’ gun shop, located in a basement below a dry cleaner’s. When Reed entered the shop carrying an army-issue pistol he wanted to sell, the owner, Andy, raised his hands in mock surrender.
    “I give up,” he said with a large grin.
    “I got you covered, Andy,” said Reed, laying the pistol on the counter. “How’s it going?”
    Andy’s girlfriend Brenda was in the shop. She was wearing a pink filmy top with clusters of tiny feathers knotted to the yoke. He knew she loved to shoot, and he had gone out with her and Andy once to the old munitions works to shoot targets. She never got angry with Andy about it the way Julia had with Reed. Now she was examining a small pistol, testing its weight and the texture of the shaft. She caressed the little barrel. Her long fingernails were polished pink.
    “I wish I had a pearl-handled pistol,” she said. “A little thing to put in my purse.”
    She set the pistol down and picked up the one Reed had brought.
    “What’s that for?” she asked, running her finger along an orange stripe that was painted on it.
    “An eccentricity of the guy I got it from,” he said. “He does it to all his guns. He said it helped him zero in on the sight better.”
    Reed had bought the gun years ago from a guy named Wade at the plant. Now Reed had decided he was no longer interested in collecting more handguns. Only the historic weapons that had belonged to his grandfather Futrell were worth keeping. They were heirlooms.
    “Well, it’s an idea,” Brenda said, laying the gun on the counter.
    “Are they laying off out at the plant?” Andy asked. “What’s going to happen?”
    “Don’t know. Everybody’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
    “I don’t think it’s going to amount to anything,” Andy said. “It’s all blown out of proportion.”
    Brenda said, “My brother was in the big scrub-down in ’87 when there was that leak. Were you in that, Reed?”
    “No. I was at Disney World.”
    Brenda said, “Tony came home laughing about it. He said it was like being in the movies.”
    Reed turned to the video section at the