CHAPTER FIVESaturday, October 24, 1987
ONE—The Years of c**k and Dragon
Thanks to lucky scheduling on her predecessor’s part, Anna had weekends free (aside from being on-call matron), and today she needed every free minute she could scrape together in a stretch. First, she needed to make the rounds of the Dumpsters. Friday nights usually marked a flurry of shelf emptying, prior to a thorough cleaning of the stores over the weekend. In the IGA Dumpster alone, Anna found seven badly dented cans of soup, a nearly full box of macaroni whose plastic “window” had split, a couple of frozen deli pizzas with only a slight tracing of mold on the cheese (which she could remove before she baked them), and coup of coups, a five-pound bag of cat chow with a tear in the side.
Knowing she couldn’t make
