If Judd had been alive, he would have opened the back kitchen cabinet and emptied half a can of Raid right onto the spider nest, laughing all the while, saying things like 'Take that you little bastards' or 'No proliferating in MY cabinets, you filthy assholes'.  She would have looked on smiling a few feet away, where he wanted her.
     But Judd was old first,and dead now. So it was up to her. She got the Raid from under the sink and approached the cabinet. The nest was there, literally
oozing with tiny baby spiders. The mother was nowhere in sight. Did she venture out to hunt, like lions? Did she eat the babies for sustenance, like some fish? Gladys didn't know. She emptied the can on the babies, slammed the door and felt guilty the entire day.
     The spiders were back within a week..more little black babies scampering over Judd's grandmother's china. They deposited  black specks in the corners, slid down the sides of the soup tureen, jumped from the sides of antique cups and saucers. She watched their antics for awhile and  decided to commute their final sentence until the next day. She'd look them up in her encyclopedia, at least find out the name of the genus and  species before she zapped them.
     Judd would not have been proud. His philosophy was to do it when it should be done.  Steve, her first boyfriend, would not approve either. He was the one who had convinced her to go to secretarial school instead of college. She had thought she might major in Biology, but Steve said that was silly. Gladys, the girl biologist! What a laugh! Ten years later she found herself in an office making coffee for old Judge Weiner. Of course, she would never have met Judd if
she hadn't been the old judge's secretary. But still. She could have done Biology. She knew she could have.
     Her Compton's, 1965, said these creatures were nymphs or spiderlings, not full grown. Not mating yet.  She'd wait for their mating period. The encyclopedia said it would be after the last molt, only a few weeks from now. Just to see them doing it.  She  knew it would be better than the glimpses of  human sex she tried not to dally over while looking for late night movies on TV, up in her bedroom. Those programs were really disgusting.  She had always wondered how sex had ever got started among humans.  It seemed so utterly graceless, mechanically impossible. Spiders
would surely be more efficient at it. She'd wait and see.
     Little purple-haired Doris came  to visit. Gladys kept her in the living room, though they always had their coffee and danish in the kitchen. For fifty years they had sat there and chatted about their husbands, their children, their neighbors, the people at church. This time, Doris stayed in the living room. Gladys didn't want her stomping on her specimens.
     Unexpectedly, her eldest, Susan, came through the back door one day. Susan was the clean freak of her four. She was over fifty and still scrubbing the bathtub twice a day.
     "Mom, you've got spiders," she said. " I'll come back tomorrow with some spray."
     Of course, she forgot the spray the next time she came, a month later. She stayed on the porch blabbing away about her boring life.thank goodness, because the spiders had taken over the kitchen. Gladys took to eating her cans of beans in the living room. She didn't want to risk burning the little ones on the range.
     She found the most perfect web one day, strung across the back door. They had put it up overnight, an amazing feat. She had to see how it was done. She stayed up all night watching them fill in the corners, expand the structure from the door to the side window. Susan would not be allowed to walk through that web, not after all that work. Gladys would insist they talk on the front porch again.
     Doris dropped by again a few weeks later. She used her inane 'two bits and a quarter' knock. She'd been knocking that way for forty years. It had always been annoying, but she had never told her so. Gladys headed her off in the front yard.
     Doris said, "What are you hiding in there, Gladys? A boyfriend?"
     Gladys laughed and said no, she'd just washed the kitchen floor. The kitchen floor of course was now black with spider feces and the carcasses of insects they'd killed. Doris would not understand.
     And it was getting crowded for her darlings there in the kitchen. She took a few of her favorites into the living room and deposited them behind the couch, in a dark warm corner. They were the bright ones, the energetic ones, the hardest working ones. And now they were little colonists, discovering the world of her damask couch, her coffee table, the cabinets Judd had made in the garage the year before he died. Another batch of babies was born there.  He would have liked that. He always loved babies.
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     "Gladys? Gladys, what are you doing in there?"
     It was Doris at the kitchen door again. She was wanting her cup of coffee and an hour's gossip.  Well, I have no gossip, and  I don't feel like being nice to Doris.
     "I'm under the weather , Doris. Can't today."
     "Gladys, you said that last week ."
     "Did I?"
     Why couldn't she just go away? Didn't she have anyone else to bother?
     "Yes, you did. Should I call Mrs. Malvern? Or a doctor?"
     "No! I'm fine, really."
     "Then let me in."
     "Look, Doris, the kitchen is a mess, and I don't feel like talking."
     They were rustling around under the sink. There was the big one, Maizy she called her, after poor dead
Judd's mother, Maizy Malvern. Yes, Judd Malvern was dead, but not his mother. Life was so topsy-turvy,
Gladys thought, too difficult to fathom. Maizy, the spider, had turned out to be much nicer than Maizy,
her mother-in-law, and a better mother, too. It was Maizy making that low rumble now. Maizy and all her
kin.

     Gladys liked the correct word for the babies: spiderlings. They were growing fast and had taken to
exploring the territory, making friends with the ants and the silverfish. She was their friend, too. At
night, they came up to the bedroom and kissed her, on her lips, on her eyelids, soft touches in the dark.
     "I don't care if the kitchen is a mess. I'm coming in," Doris said.
     Gladys heard the kitchen door squeak, heard Doris pause as she crunched through the roach carcasses.
     "Doris, do go away."
     "Gladys, something is wrong, I can tell. I just want to."
     Doris' purple hair turned black first, then her face, her mouth wide open, screaming, but no scream coming out, her mouth full of spiderlings, Maizy jumping from hair to chin, chin to nose to mouth, protecting them, protecting Gladys. Loving them. And her.