Artie had a twitch in his right eye. He hadn’t always had a twitch. This was the first time it had happened to him. He wasn’t sure when it started, but he did know it wasn’t long after he grabbed the old ladies. He knew they were kind of loony, but this was beyond loony. If he didn’t need them to get the money, he’d have held a pillow over their faces just to shut them up.
Listening to them was like the damn chalk on Louise’s blackboard, only without the pauses. Their voices rose, they fell, they blended. One sister would start a sentence, another would pick it up and the last would finish it, then start a new one. Their ideas flowed together and away, shifting from one thing to another with no rhyme or reason for the change.
It was a torturous form of insanity. If he hadn’t had Helen, t
