“You’re scaring the hell out of me, Rosie.

“Saturday night I couldn’t find you. Kansas scouted you out when I was about to call the police,” Everett continues.

Rose is intrigued. Images come to mind—of strange men with flashlights and barking dogs on leashes, all wanting to find her. She tiptoes to the door, opening it a crack, half expecting some leather-jacketed, grim-faced sheriff. It’s Everett there, with the pleading look in his eyes. How is she supposed to stay mad at him anyway, especially when he’s carrying the biggest box of chocolates she’s ever seen?

He holds the candy out to her. A pang stabs at her conscience. Everett is such a good man. He doesn’t deserve what she did.

Rose’s vision has blurred. His scent fills her whole head. His damp skin against hers is all she wants.

If this could last forever, their closeness, maybe what happened years back wouldn’t really matter.

Nancy Pinard

Nancy Pinard was raised in an arts-oriented family who attended a Methodist church in Dayton, Ohio. She danced with the Dayton Ballet Company, but gave up her dream of a career in dance when she suffered an injury that required surgery. Her other love, literature, led her to teach high school and junior high English. She began writing while she was raising two sons, and while her husband served as senior pastor to a large congregation. In 2005 she completed an MFA in creative writing. She now teaches at Sinclair Community College. Her short stories have appeared in literary magazines and an anthology. Butterfly Soup is her second published novel.

Butterfly Soup
Nancy Pinard

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Ron, Joshua and John

Acknowledgments:

It is no small task to nurture a writer’s progress through a manuscript. Many fellow writers invested their attention in multiple drafts. The guidance and insight of the following writers was invaluable: Ed Davis, Katrina Kittle, Nancy Jones, Suzanne Kelly-Garrison, Diane Chiddister, Hallie Kranos and Sharon Shaver. The Byliners— Lynn Campbell, Peggy Barnes, Diane Bengson, Caroline Cooper, Celia Elliott, Lynn Dille, Vincenzina Krymon, Doris LaPorte and Sarah Rickman.

I am thankful to Clint McCown for his attention to my work at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. The reference librarians of the Wright Memorial Public Library researched fine points of verisimilitude for me. My cousins, Karin and Dr. Andrew Bailey, and friend Dr. Pat Ronald supplied me with medical opinions during revision.

My best friend, Louise Greene, shared memories of her Catholic childhood.

My agent, Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli, believed and stood firm, listened when I lost heart, refused to give up. I am honored to call her my friend.

My editor, Ann Leslie Tuttle, likewise persevered until she found the work’s perfect home. Her determination and enthusiasm have brought my dream to the readership. Thanks also to Adam Wilson, editorial assistant, who ably guided me through the process.

My husband, Ron, and sons, Josh and John, gave me the freedom to find my voice. They have loved me and honored my needs. That’s an inestimable gift. May every woman have such an extraordinary family.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 1

T he phone rings so early on Saturday morning, Rose Forrester tears herself from sleep and runs to the kitchen, the dread of dire illness or accidents propelling her down the stairs to the rhythm of the Hail Mary repeating in her head. “Yes?” she pants into the receiver.

“Rosie? You’ll never guess what!” Helen Slezac’s voice is squeaky with excitement. Rose hears the swoosh of washing machines in the background.

“Helen? It’s only six-fifty. We’re sleeping in,” Rose whispers. She hopes her descent didn’t waken the household. Everett has been looking tired. And Valley came in late from her date.

“I know. I know. But this one can’t wait. I had to tell you.”

Rose tries to chase the edge from her voice. Poor Helen has been divorced so long, she’s forgotten the pleasure of drowsing in bed. “Tell me what?”

“I got in early and was waiting for the dryer to quit tumbling to yank Jed Peterson’s stuff before it wrinkled—you know how picky he is—when I looked up to see an old friend walking into Millie’s.”

Rose’s heart has slowed to match the glub-dub of the washers. She pictures Helen at her usual post—at the pay phone by the Laundromat’s front window, spying on the donut shop. “Who, Helen? Tell me.”

“Rob MacIntyre.”

Rose mouths the syllables. Her third finger finds her mouth, and her teeth search for loose cuticles. Rob’s is the one name she’d hoped never to hear again when he disappeared from town seventeen years ago.

“Rosie? Are you still there? Is something wrong?”

“Everett’s calling,” Rose says so softly she can barely hear herself. “I’ve got to go.” She hangs the receiver on the hook and lingers a moment, as though still connected to Rob by Helen’s voice. Her mouth tastes metallic, as if she’s been sucking on nickels. She tiptoes into the bedroom, looks to make sure Everett is still sleeping, slips a dress from its hanger, and hurries to the bathroom.

She must have brushed her teeth, combed her hair and zipped the dress, but she only remembers turning the car key and wanting to hush the engine.

Her Galaxy heads toward town, slowing abruptly where the speed limit drops from fifty to twenty-five. Chief Dudley waits in his cruiser behind the same bush every day, clocking all the residents. She salutes as she passes him, then coasts toward the three downtown blocks of Eden proper, lurching from one corner to the next. It’s silly to have so many stop signs in a one-bank town.

In the middle of one block she pauses for old Mr. Cockburn to cross to Millie’s Dunk ’n’ Sip from the loading dock at the Feed and Seed. She forces a smile and tells herself to nod and act normal, though stopping directly in front of the donut shop is last on her list. Mr. Cockburn dodders in front of her car, his left hand trailing across her hood for balance. Rose oh-so-casually glances to her left. The hunched backs of the Saturday-morning regulars show through the window, middle-aged men straddling counter stools in their John Deere caps, chugging hot coffee as if June temperatures didn’t faze them. She can hear them in her head, chewing on predictable topics between swallows—whether Reagan’s new agriculture secretary will favor Ohio or if the plate ump in last night’s Reds game was on the take. But even squinting she can’t make out one back from the next. Can’t tell if one of them belongs to Rob. Helen sounded certain, but Rose needs to see for herself.

At the corner one of Eden’s single mothers leaves Duds-In-Suds with a laundry basket balanced on one hip. The woman brushes the hair off her brow, and two raggedy kids with green mouths come straggling behind her, sucking on lollipops. Rose slows, remembering the days when Valley was small and wakened early, when Rose, too, had finished her housework before 8:00 a.m. The woman steps into the road, then stops to make eye contact with Rose. The children bump into their mother’s back. Rose takes note of the kids’ health, as though she’s assigned to watch over fatherless children everywhere. Welfare brats, Everett calls them. Rose winces every time he says it, his judgment slashing at her insides.

There’s a parking spot one block up where she’ll have a good view of Main Street but Helen can’t see her. She turns around in the alley next to the theater and parallel parks facing Millie’s. Then she pulls her checkbook and a pen from her purse, so if anyone wonders why she’s sitting there, she can pretend to be balancing her account. But no one is outside except for the single mom, who piles the kids into her rusty boat of a Chevy. Rose strains to see if she can make out car seats through the windshield, though maybe the kids are too old for that. The Chevy cruises by, the kids standing behind the broad bench seat while their mother flips through radio channels. “Seat belts!” Rose hollers, but then is instantly ashamed. Everett regularly reminds her what’s none of her business. Luckily the Chevy radio is blaring, so no one heard.

The street is quiet for long minutes afterward, and Rose considers where Rob might stay if he were really back in town. His mother’s house sold—she saw the sign—so if he’s there, he can’t stay long. She once heard Phil Langston mention Rob’s name in Millie’s. She can’t remember that they buddied around in school, but those things changed, judging from herself and Helen anyway. The two of them had hardly spoken until after graduation. Helen had smoked in the woods behind the school with the fast crowd, while Rose, who didn’t own her own clarinet, had stayed after school to practice in the band room. Everett had hung out in that hallway, so she hadn’t really been by herself. Rob had always been on a ball field of one shape or another, with all the girls going gaga from the stands. Since Rose hadn’t been one of them, their night together was all the more miraculous.

Just then Millie’s screen door swings open. A bunch of the regulars ramble out, turning and talking to the person holding the door, jostling each other and laughing. Then Rob steps onto the stoop in jeans and a tucked-in T-shirt. “Sweet Jesus,” comes from Rose’s lips unbidden, and she fingers the rayon of her dress, rubbing its silky softness over her bare thighs. Rob stands with his hands in his hip pockets, rocking slightly from heels to toes. She’d know that stance anywhere—a man version of the boy who, in the warm water of Kaiser Lake, first freed her body from more than her bathing suit. Rob’s a little broader for all these years, but so is she. Still, gravity’s been kind. His hair is shorter now, freshly washed and combed, and he’s grown a mustache. He turns from the doorway, waves to the guys going the other way and heads up the street toward her. Her first instinct is to duck, and Rose finds herself sprawling across the front seat, wishing the hot-pink flowers on her dress would die. The plastic upholstery grabs at her legs, and the titillating mix of exhilaration and danger that kept her awake those long-ago summer nights grips her once again. Never mind she’s thirty-five and runs a household. Her schoolgirl foolishness is back. He still has that power.

She hears his boots on the sidewalk and can’t resist opening her eyes. He glances down. Valley’s smile flits across his mouth and eyes. Dimples pinpoint his cheeks. If she looks familiar, he doesn’t let on. He walks on by. She blows the bangs off her forehead and assures herself he didn’t miss a step. He smiled, yes, but anyone would smile at the sight of a woman lying on a car seat. She needn’t feel foolish. It made perfect sense to lie down in your car when you didn’t feel well.

But that’s nonsense, and Rose knows it.

When enough time has passed that Rose is certain Rob is farther down the street, she sits up and searches her rearview mirror. She can’t help noting how Rob’s shoulders preside over his narrow waist and firm buttocks. Her hands cup as if around his bottom. Her palms remember.

Rob disappears around a corner, and Rose checks her reflection. She sees crow’s feet, but her brow is still smooth. It’s the one advantage of carrying a little extra weight. Her skin is young-looking, even if her hips and thighs make it hard to find a bathing suit. She stretches her mouth in a grimace to exercise her neck muscles, then relaxes again. Her chin looks tighter for it, she’s sure, and she does the exercise a few more times. A double chin would spoil her looks.

Two car doors slam behind her. She watches Woody Mansfield and his son get out of the Mansfield Plumbing truck and jaywalk to Millie’s, Woody catching the sleeve of Billy’s Little League shirt to hurry him across. Everett has been working on a new house with Woody this week, making sure Rose has a good life and she wonders when she’ll realize that Rob’s good looks are no match for Everett’s hard work. Whatever brought Rob back to Eden, concern for her welfare wasn’t it. He probably doesn’t even know Valley is a girl—except that he’s been in touch with Phil. She wonders what Phil knows and if he has ever talked to Everett. They’ve never been close, she’s certain of that, but there was no controlling who sat down on the next stool at Millie’s. At least Everett isn’t in there this morning. She needs to get home before he realizes she’s been gone.

Rose starts the engine and pulls out of the parking space.

In her bathrobe once again, Rose busies herself in the stuffy kitchen, parting the café curtains, then working to raise swollen windows. “Who needs him anyway?” she mutters, giving the wooden frame a whack. “Everett’s the better man.” She lifts in vain, then gives the frame another good thunk—as if, energetic enough, she might not only raise the window but send Rob back where he came from. By the time she’s ratcheted the second window up, she’s broken a sweat. The morning breeze feels fresh on her skin, though it holds the telltale heaviness of another humid day.

On her way by the drawer, Rose chooses a chocolate from the box of Fanny Farmer she keeps hidden under the silverware tray. Chocolate and mint mingle on her tongue as she runs cold water into her mother’s old aluminum coffeepot, measures grounds into the basket and adds tiny pieces of broken eggshell to cut the bitterness. A whiff of propane wafts up before the burner poofs into flame. She centers the pot. Everett gave her an automatic coffeemaker on Mother’s Day—the one with the timer so she could wake up to fresh coffee—but a month has passed and she hasn’t unboxed it. She can’t think why she should change when the old way works fine.

Rose tiptoes to the stairs to listen for bedroom sounds. It’s nearly eight o’clock, but Everett isn’t stirring. Valley’s room is silent. She climbs to the second floor, stops at her daughter’s door and pushes it open. She can’t see Valley’s head past the enormous jar on the bedside stand where Valley farms butterflies. The current resident is a green caterpillar with a pink underbelly, nothing but a worm to Rose, but at least it’s in a jar. It hangs from its twig by a silken thread so invisible, it might be floating in air.

Valley lies facing the wall, her body curled up. She’s still dressed in the shirt she wore on her date and the sapphire pendant Rose passed down for Valley’s sixteenth birthday. Rose cranes her neck to see the narrow chin with the wide brow that has always reminded her of the Flemish Madonna that hung in her childhood church. Instead she sees black mascara streaked down Valley’s cheeks. “Mother of God, have mercy,” Rose murmurs, wondering that she had fallen asleep before her daughter came in. Sex does that to Rose—makes her relaxed and irresponsible. She should have behaved herself.

She fingers the scapular she’s kept in her bathrobe pocket since Everett insisted she take it off. The tiny picture of the Virgin is sweat-stained and talcum-furry, still attached to the shoelace she’d worn around her neck through childhood. Rose tucks the scapular in the zipper pouch of Valley’s purse and puts it back on the dresser. Valley’s stuffed animals sit lined up facing her music stand. Rose chooses a lamb with a tattered pink bow and tucks it in the nook of Valley’s chin.

At her own bedroom door Rose sees the slope of Everett’s bare shoulder peeking out from the quilt. She pictures him propped over her, broad and strong on straight elbows. But in the morning light his pectorals look flabbier than she remembered, and her mother’s voice plays in her head: Control yourself. Pleasure doesn’t last. Eat only enough to know you’ve eaten. It’s the only tone Rose remembers now—since the night she was orphaned by a heart attack. She presses her thumbs into the pudge around her midriff, tattling, tattling on her. She used to be thin.

She kneels on the new waterbed and bounces. The mattress sloshes with the movement, and Everett’s body teeters back and forth. The musk of his skin—heightened by his effort the night before—is slightly sour. His eyes are closed, but a smile plays across his lips. His hand sneaks toward her and tugs on her bathrobe tie.

“Not now, Everett. We have to talk.”

He opens one eye.

“Were you awake when Valley came in last night?”

“I woke at one-ten and checked her room. She was asleep.”

“Her mascara’s streaked all down her face. I knew that boy was no good.”

Everett closes the eye again. “When she cried last month you blamed her hormones. Why is it suddenly the boy’s fault?”

Rose rolls onto her bottom. The mattress water cuddles her hips. “When he picked her up, he wouldn’t look me in the face.”

“Rosie, you never had to go into a strange house and meet a girl’s parents.” He tries to pull her over next to him, to comfort her.

Rose resists. Someone has to get upset about these things.

Everett gives up with a sigh. “She’s sixteen, Rosie. Nearly grown. You can’t run her life or choose her friends.”

You never did care about Valley, Rose thinks for the umpteenth time. She scoots to the edge of the bed. The mattress undulates, and she wonders what silly whim made him buy a waterbed—one of those midlife things, she suspects. At least it’s not some overpriced coffin, a motorcycle or a race car. Still. It has to be a sin to be so comfortable. “It will serve you right if she gets pregnant,” Rose sputters.

“For god’s sake, Rosie. She’s not a tramp.”

Rose hugs herself to hide her cringing. How’s she supposed to tell him the truth when he says things like that?

Everett tickles her upper arm, then reaches for her breast. Rose pushes his hand off. “I do trust her. It’s you boys I don’t trust.” She purposely bounces the bed and escapes his reach. “My mother was right. Men only want one thing.”

Rose drives past the brick elementary school and adjacent park, then crosses the bridge over the Miami River. The Catholic church, Our Lady of the Rosary, squats on the other side, a brick fortress facing east, bordered on three sides with blacktop, then graves, before the farmland picks up once again. She doesn’t know where else to go. Her conscience—an entity so real Rose expects to see it on a diagram of the human body—rants in her head: This is what happens when you fornicate and lie. You should have told Everett the truth before he married you. Of course she should have. And she didn’t. She’s certain of one thing now: Rob and Everett in a town this small is one man too many. Maybe the priest can tell her what to do.

There are no cars in the parking lot, only an old woman with long gray hair—a Chippewa Indian (crazy, some say) who keeps to herself on Esther Dalrymple’s land. The woman is picking through the church’s Dumpster as if she’s lost something. Stubby white disks lie around her feet. They look to Rose like burned votive candles, but surely the church wouldn’t throw prayers for people’s loved ones in the trash. They must be leftover biscuits from a church supper. The woman is hungry. All Rose knows is that Esther claims the Indian healed her roan calf and Joe Harper took his mother’s sick dog to her after it was too late.

Rose parks away from the Dumpster and squeezes through the church’s heavy oak-and-iron door. The smell of tallow hangs over the narthex, and she pauses there, inhaling deeply, as if wax has the power to sanctify her worldly thoughts. Instead it reminds her of crayons. She fumbles around in her purse for her grocery money, finds a five, folds it in fourths and fits it through the slot in the donation box. Then she lights a candle on the tiered table and asks Our Lady to watch over her confession. Her statue is adorned today with white roses. Someone in town has died. Still, she finds peace in the Virgin’s sweet face, as she had in the months after Rob’s desertion when only the Holy Mother knew and appreciated how she felt.

The sanctuary lies beyond a carved archway. Rose pulls a scarf from her purse to cover her hair. Father Andrew is at the altar, tidying up the morning Mass. He is old and stooped, as if burdened by the weight of the crucifix hanging over his head. Rose hides her face with the scarf, stands before the confessional, coughs. He motions for her to enter the booth, then joins her, on the other side of the partition. The rote learned in childhood pours forth. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession.”

“Go on.” His voice is thin and hollow and makes Rose’s voice sound shrill in her head. Her stomach gurgles and she remembers the chocolate she shouldn’t have eaten if she wants Communion.

“There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“Yes—”

“It happened some time back.”

“Go on.”

“I was seventeen.”

“Yes—”

“In love.”

“Yes—”

She can’t bring herself to go on. How could a priest, being male and celibate, understand her terror?

“And you…?” He’s starting to sound impatient.

“You have to understand. I was so afraid after it happened. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“That you…?”

Why must he make her say it? What other sin do you commit with someone you love? “I did it, okay? But it wasn’t just that,” she hurries on, afraid he’ll get angry if she doesn’t spit it out fast. “One thing led to another.” Through the screen she smells the wine on his breath. There’s a greater sin involved. “Oh, God.” Her throat tightens. She can barely speak. “I’ve received Communion anyway. Every week.”

She hears him shift in the booth and begins to babble. “I had to or my mother would have known. No one caught me and nothing happened, so I just, you know, forgot it was wrong, I guess.” It sounds lame, but it just about sums up how she’s been married so long—seventeen years almost—without telling Everett. If no one found out, she had reasoned, and nothing happened, telling the truth did nothing but hurt people. Even now she is only hurting herself with all this confessing. If she had any sense, she’d walk out this minute. She pulls the scarf down over her face, afraid the priest can see through walls, even in darkness.

The bench on the priest’s side creaks. “Let’s adjourn to the room next door. An open discussion, face-to-face, might help you more.”

Rose’s fingers press the backs of her clasped hands. Face-to-face indeed. Father Andrew is supposed to pronounce her penance and administer absolution, not insist she confess the new way. To risk an open discussion, she’d have to leave town. She hasn’t even mentioned deceiving Everett. She can’t imagine saying it in broad daylight.

“And if that’s not possible?”

“Then your priorities are wrong. Nothing is more important than your immortal soul.”

Rose struggles up from flattened knees, steadying herself on the walls of the confessional. She pulls the scarf closer. “Thank you, Father,” she says, but she is anything but thankful. She is on to his game. He wants to see her face so he can deny her Communion. On her way out she wonders why she thought to tell this man anything. If she tells anyone, it should be Everett.

Rose drives back through town to the Safeway market, accelerating through the yellow light at the new plaza. Confession is needless. If she had been born Protestant, she wouldn’t have to confess to anyone but God. Everett’s probably right about the Pope. God didn’t make him infallible, her mother did.

The plaza parking lot is full of people. Summer Saturdays are like this. Little Leaguers, Girl Scouts, Rotarians—all out raising funds. Rose checks the supply of quarters in her ashtray and tucks them in her pocket. She’s searching for a parking place and scanning the lot for Rob, when a toddler appears out of nowhere, in front of her car. Her brakes squeal. The car shimmies, skids. A woman shrieks. The tires grab. The car settles back into itself. The boy stands inches from her bumper, a wisp of blond hair visible over her hood. His mother stands in a puddle of groceries and torn bags, her face frozen in the scream. A broken bottle of apple juice is soaking the paper bag.

Rose slumps over her steering wheel. His mother steps from the rubble of groceries and snatches the child up. The child wails. Blessed, blessed sound. Rose exhales her anxiety. “Thank you, Jude, glorious apostle, faithful servant and friend of Jesus.” She pockets her hands in the opposite underarm to stop the prickling sensation. The mother is sobbing now. Rose watches her rock the boy, holding that precious head in her palm and kissing his hair, as Rose herself might have held Valley this morning if her daughter were younger.

The woman carries her son to a station wagon nearby. Rose parks. She fetches a coffee can that’s rolled under a fender and sets it near the jumble of groceries. She picks the boxes of macaroni and cheese from the puddle of apple juice and stacks them in a pile next to the instant oatmeal, the English muffins and the Peter Pan. She has to do something to make up for scaring them. If she had hit the child— But Rose refuses that thought. She’s told Valley never, ever to speed in a school zone. If Rose ever hit a child, she would never recover.

But why wasn’t the child up in the cart seat, where drivers could see him?

Rose heads for the store, breasts cradled in her arms as if she were cold. Inside she finds the cereal aisle and wanders up and down, her heart drubbing hard as she is alternately the driver and the mother of the crying child. She can’t find the Shredded Wheat. It’s always a maze, this aisle—the store brand’s look-alike boxes mixed in with the real thing—but today it’s impossible. The priest’s voice mingles with the woman’s shriek: Your priorities are wrong. Nothing is more important than your immortal soul. Rose takes down one box, puts it back and takes another, finally settling for Cheerios. On her way to the cashier she adds a package of pink, yellow and brown sugar wafers—the ones Valley reached for when she was a toddler in the cart seat—and a palm-size red-yellow-and-blue rubber ball for the toddling boy. She breezes through the express lane, forgetting that she needs coffee cream, and takes off with her bagged stash.

Rose is searching the parking lot for the mother’s station wagon when she’s caught by a singsong refrain rising and falling over the rattle of carts on the blacktop. She traces the chant to the end of the plaza where the band parents usually hold their bake sales and raffles. It’s some kind of auction. The auctioneer is gobbling away, badgering his crowd to bid higher. She hears him calling names. Sister Mary Theresa. That has to be a nun. Rose feels as though he has hollered her name. In a way, he has. Once upon a time, Theresa of the Little Flower was her favorite saint.

At the outer edge of the group she peers between heads. Steel bed frames stand in the back of a truck, bound into units—two metal end pieces with legs and a metal spring in each package—each labeled with the name of a nun. The auctioneer’s assistant steps through the crowd to hand Rose a flyer.

Buy a bed slept in by a Sister of Charity

to benefit

Dayton’s own

St. Agnes Women’s Shelter

The Sisters of Charity, the flyer says in small print, have donated their old beds to raise funds. The St. Agnes Shelter will provide home delivery to anyone donating over twenty dollars per bed.

Only five frames remain in the back of the pickup. The auctioneer begins the bidding on Sister Mary Theresa’s bed at twenty dollars. A woman in shorts and red canvas Keds raises her hand.

“Twenty, I hear twenty. Who’ll give me twenty-five?”

A woman in jeans and a Notre Dame T-shirt raises her hand.

There’s a hush and Rose feels the mounting excitement. Perhaps it’s a sign, she thinks, the direction she’d wanted from the priest, delivered by an alternate means. How else can she explain it? It’s not every day you find a nun’s bed at the grocery. Everett would call it coincidence, but then Everett believes the earth came about after an explosion, which makes as much sense to Rose as throwing calico squares up in the air and expecting them to land in a quilting pattern.

Rose rummages in her purse. She finds the plastic grain of her checkbook. Thanks to Rob’s appearance this morning, she knows just how much she has.

“Thirty,” says the woman in red Keds.

The auctioneer looks left. “Will you go thirty-five?”

Rose raises her hand high before the Notre Dame woman can answer, recalling the details of a bedtime story her mother read to her often—a story about St. Clare protecting herself and her convent by holding the blessed host before a band of marauding soldiers.

The auctioneer asks for forty. Notre Dame raises her hand.

Rose looks at the woman to get some idea how high she might go. Her jeans are clean but frayed. Her hair is flat against her head. She is not the beauty-parlor kind.

“Fifty,” Rose says defiantly.

The auctioneer turns right. “Will you go sixty?” Red Keds bows her head. Left. Notre Dame turns away. Rose has won. She puts her groceries down and fishes for her checkbook.

“Going once. Going twice. Sold to the lady in the flowered dress for fifty dollars,” the auctioneer proclaims. “God bless you, dear.”

Rose smiles at him. He is not a priest, but it will have to do.

CHAPTER 2

S ince last Thursday when the doctor named his intermittent symptoms multiple sclerosis, Everett dreads morning. Not the whole morning, just that moment when daylight jolts him from his dreams, as if he’s been cruising down the freeway in his Ford Fairlane—Rosie at his side and Valley, frozen in his mind at age eleven, prattling away in the back-seat—when the car slams into a tree. His stomach flies forward; his body remains belted to the car.

Everett closes his eyes, tries to meld with the warm water in the new mattress and opens his eyes a second time. His vision is fine, today at least. The edges of the room, where walls meet ceiling, are clear, not fuzzy. The wallpaper’s red and white stripes are as distinct as prison bars. He wiggles his toes and taps his fingers on the mattress, then flexes his knees and elbows. The mattress ripples beneath him. He reaches for Rosie.

Instead of her usual sleeping form—sprawled on her stomach, left hand beside her cheek—he finds a pillow. He smiles in spite of her absence. He loves her soft breasts, the curve of her hips, how her skin springs back to his touch like yeasty dough. She’s all woman, not a skinny stick like Helen—always working out and picking at her food as if it’s poison. But Rose isn’t strong like Helen, either. When he can no longer walk, how will she wrestle him out of the bathtub, into a wheelchair? He likes being the caretaker. Carrier of suitcases and heavy grocery bags. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

The worst part is not knowing what will happen. Or when. He was fine two days ago, before he knew his episodes had a name—and a deteriorating prognosis. Now he feels like a goddamn time bomb. In his mind’s eye, a lighted fuse snakes across the quilt connected to bundled sticks of dynamite. He’s got to snuff that fuse. Somehow.

He hasn’t told Rosie. The thought of her expression, eyes soft and vulnerable, brows lifted, makes his stomach turn over. But he can’t keep it secret forever. Maybe it’s best to just tell her—to get it over with.

He hears her feet pad along the hall carpet and into the room. He senses her closeness, smells her breath as she peers over the quilt. He pretends to be sleeping, but when she gets close enough he grips the tie on her robe. The front comes loose as he tugs. “Not now, Everett,” she says in her daytime voice. “We have to talk.” When she flattens her robe to her chest, her nipples protrude through the pink cotton. He’d like to push them like buttons, but then she’d know he can see them. Even at night she wants the lights out. Can she really be so modest after all this time? Or does she just think she’s supposed to be?

“Were you awake when Valley came in last night?” she asks.

He tells her he got up at one.

“Her mascara’s streaked all down her face. I knew that boy was no good.”

There she goes again, jumping to conclusions. Everett tries to distract her, reaching under her arm to knead her breast, but she’s not falling for it. When he won’t jump on her worry wagon, she flounces off. Everett imagines himself slipping her robe down off her shoulders, watching it fall to the floor as she dances in the morning light. He rocks the bed to the slinky music in his head, tightening and loosening his hips.

It will never happen. The bed settles.

Until Thursday he’d told himself her modesty was fine. It brought back the feeling of the first time, kept her always new. Maybe she knows that. Maybe her shyness is just an act. His groin stirs. Nah. Rosie isn’t clever. She is Rosie of the White Sheets. A goddamn Catholic saint. She doesn’t know that time is running out. By next week she may not want him at all, even in the darkness. He’s got to tell her.

Everett rolls back onto his side and pushes himself up. So far so good. Nothing is numb, though so far he hasn’t wakened to numbness. Reading a pamphlet shouldn’t make symptoms appear, but since reading it, he’s tracking every twinge. His legs hold when he hoists himself onto them—not like last Tuesday, when his right leg buckled suddenly and he fell from the fourth rung of the ladder. He’d chalked up his bruises to the hazards of work when Rosie had asked. But it wasn’t the first time he’d fallen without cause.

He listens to the water run through the pipes as she turns the taps on and off. The silence means she’s dressing. “Rosie?” No answer. He raises his voice. “Rosie?” Silence. His speech may go someday. He’ll blabber, and people will think he’s retarded and avert their eyes. No one will hire a retarded electrical contractor. “Rooo-ssieee!”

“I have to run to the store, Everett,” Rosie says, emerging from the bathroom fully clothed and wriggling her bare feet into heeled pumps. “We’re out of cream.”

“Wait.” She’s halfway down the stairs before he formulates what it is he really wants. “I thought we might go somewhere today. You know, take a little day trip. Spend some time together.” Her shoes tap on the kitchen tile and the door shuts behind her.

Okay, he thinks. If that’s the way you want it. See if I’m here when you need me. He pulls on boxers, shorts and a polo and ties his sneakers, plotting to exit before she returns.

In the bathroom Everett pushes the clutter of Valley’s makeup aside. He wipes her blond hairs from the vanity with a damp sponge and wonders at the irritation he feels. Maybe Rosie is right. Maybe feeding, clothing and sheltering a daughter isn’t all there is to fathering. But Rose doesn’t know what it’s like to be him. He’s never admitted it to anyone, but from day one he and Valley were off-kilter. In the hospital he had looked at the wrinkled, slimy infant Rosie held, seen the adoration in her eyes, the protective curve of her shoulders, and felt like a stranger. He’d chalked it up to Valley’s early arrival. He and Rosie hardly knew one another when Valley turned up. Rosie’s growing belly had seemed a pleasant pacifier that compensated for her disappearing figure. The pregnancy slowed Rosie down after the agitation of their courtship. She’d laid quietly on the couch many evenings with her head in his lap, loaning his hands her nightgowned breasts and belly, a drowsy smile on her face. He’d led her off to bed easily after that, and she’d folded herself around him, accepting his attentions to the end. Then Valley arrived and he got lost in the chaos of feedings and diapers and crying in the night. Rosie’s breasts weren’t his after that. None of her was.

Now that Valley is grown, Rosie is paranoid. He can’t make a living and still worry over every little thing. When Rosie harps about the things he doesn’t do for Valley, he wants to withhold what affection he does feel. He rinses the sponge under the tap, squeezes the water out and scrutinizes its intricate structure of cell walls. Outnumbered by women, he feels like one of its holes—surrounded but not connected. When his walls break down, he won’t exist at all.

He hurries through his shave, musing on places he might like to go. With Rosie at the store, he doesn’t have much time to make his getaway. He’s combing the hair over his thinning crown when he sees the copy of the AAA magazine on the floor next to the john. The Miami Valley insert features adventures on Lake Erie. A sportsman’s paradise waits three hours north, and he hasn’t sampled any of it. A photo of a man harnessed to a yellow-and-orange parachute particularly fascinates him. Parasailing, the caption calls it. The chute is pulled by a speedboat, but the man is flying high in the air. One step short of skydiving, it looks to him. He’s always wanted to know how it feels—that moment of free fall after leaving the plane, before the chute opens. A lot like an orgasm, he suspects, a gigantic orgasm. He’ll do it while he’s still able. And if part of his body gives out while he’s doing it…well, he’ll go down enjoying himself. It will serve Rosie right.

Everett grabs his duffel from the closet and stuffs it with underwear, another shirt and swim trunks. He stops at Valley’s door on his way by and looks in. On the other side of her latest caterpillar and the phone he added when her friends began tying up his business line, her feline form curls toward the wall. He watches the quilt rise and fall with her breathing. The distance between them grew when puberty hit. Valley became sullen then. Setting foot in her room felt like trespassing.

Maybe he’ll wait to tell Rosie. There will be plenty of time later. Years. If he tells her now, she’ll strap him to a wheelchair the way she wants to chain Valley to the bedpost. She’ll insist on driving everywhere, and he’ll just sit there watching life pass by as if it’s television. If he doesn’t hold tight to the checkbook, he’ll lose control of everything. Thank God he’s invested their money. Hasn’t let her spend it.

He scribbles a note before he leaves.

Rosie,

I’ve gone out to make a bid. There’s a big one on the line. I may be late.

Love,

Everett

He chuckles to himself. He hasn’t lied exactly, considering what he has in mind. His sense of humor is one thing he won’t lose. Not if he holds on tight.

As Everett backs out of the garage, he glances at the garden. Small shoots are pushing through the soil, but from a distance he can’t tell if they’re plants or weeds. At the end of the driveway he glances up the road nervously. Just his luck, Rosie will pull into sight before he can make his escape.

The air’s heavy this morning, laying a haze over the horizon. He’s grateful for his air-conditioning as he speeds out of Eden. He plays with the radio dial. An announcer’s voice tunes in midsentence.

“…the British in their ongoing countersiege of the Falklands. Port Stanley is defended by some seven thousand Argentine troops.

“Israeli land, sea and air forces invaded southern Lebanon in retaliation for the assassination attempt on Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London on June third. Ground troops occupy the territory from Tyre on the coast to the foothills of Mount Hermon following Israel’s June fourth air strikes on Palestinian targets near Beirut.”

Everett turns it off. Air strikes are everywhere.

Ten miles north, he stops to tank up in Union City—first at the McDonald’s drive-through where he orders two sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuits with a large coffee, then at a Sunoco. Everett eats one of the biscuits, then gets out to pump his gas. It’s hot. Dr. Burns said heat and humidity aggravate his condition, and this June has been a doozy, with all the rain. He checks his oil and tire pressure, though before the diagnosis he wouldn’t have bothered. Now his car has to be dependable in case he has an episode.

“Find everything you need?” the attendant calls, stepping from behind the raised hood of a Thunderbird. He’s just a kid, nineteen at most, in work boots and a baggy one-piece coverall that says Ben. Hell, if Everett were a car, this kid could rewire his circuits.

“Just need to pay my bill,” Everett says, feeling connected to Ben by the cord strung across the concrete. He might like to take him aside. Buy him a coffee. Tell him not to waste his youth or take his health for granted.

Ben would nod his head, say yeah and light up a cigarette.

Inside the station Everett pays with plastic, buys cigarettes from a machine and heads back to the car. The driver’s door stands open, and Everett is surprised to see a dog lying on the floor on the passenger side. “Hey, Fella,” Everett says and puts his hand out, palm up, to a beagle mutt with brown eyes, droopy ears and a pointy snout. Fella has a biscuit wrapper crumpled between his paws and looks up at Everett with guilty eyes, cowering slightly. Everett laughs. “Teach me to leave the door open.” The dog stops licking the grease-stained wrapper to lap Everett’s fingers. “Good stuff, huh?”

“Hey, Ben, this your dog?” Everett calls. “A dog jumped into my car.”

Ben walks over and peers in. “Not mine. I hate dogs. My kid sister got attacked by a Doberman.”

A lopsided silence hangs between them, then settles on the kid’s end.

“No shit.” It’s all Everett can think to say. He wants to ask if she’s okay but couldn’t stand to hear that she isn’t. He’d have to feel worse for Ben than he feels for himself.

This dog is no Doberman. “Must belong to someone,” Everett says finally. He turns up an ID tag on the dog’s collar. “I’ll get him out of here for you. Where’s Morningside Court?”

“Over there behind the Baptist church,” Ben says and points the way.

Everett raises the window, lights a cigarette, then circles the block with the church steeple. He parks opposite a brick ranch at 136 Morningside, where a man is out back throwing a football to a gangly boy, six maybe, in a Cincinnati Bengals cap. A Jeep and a riding mower sit side-by-side in the open garage, and a gun rack hangs in the Jeep’s back window.

Everett watches the ball bump end over end when the kid fumbles it. The kid and his dad lunge after it and roll around in a snarl of bodies that knocks the cap off the kid’s head. Everett takes a drag on his cigarette, watching its tip turn red. He waits while the nicotine floods his blood and blows smoke out his nose. Everett and his dad had played together sometimes, but it was baseball. His father, clad in Sears coveralls, would set his empty Thermos in the sink. “Hey, Rett,” he’d say. His father called him Rett. And if supper wasn’t ready he’d ask, “Want to throw the ball around?”

Everett always said yes but wished for more players—to have a game. He would ask his mother to play, but she’d say someone had to cook—an odd excuse since she barely touched the meals she made. His mother didn’t sweat. Little lines radiated from her lips in permanent discontent. She never even ate her lipstick off.

A dog would want to play ball. Everett had asked for one for his birthday. His mother had shuddered and given him fish instead. She hadn’t seemed to get it—that he’d wanted to do more than just look at his pet. Despite his disappointment, he’d spent his allowance on snails and colored gravel and a ceramic castle with turrets for them to swim around. At fourteen, when his shoulders broadened and his hips narrowed and his mother shied away from touching him at all, he took cool baths and released the fish into the tub water with him. They’d flipped their fantails at him and chased one another around his legs.

Everett feels the dog’s belly but finds no genitals. “Guess you’re not a Fella,” he says, rumpling her loppy ears. She stands on the seat, cocks her head slightly to one side and wags her tail as if she’s known him forever. She doesn’t seem to know he’s driven her home. Maybe if the windows were down.

Everett removes her tag, shifts into Drive and steps on the gas. The kid is too young to catch the damn football. Any dog will do for him. And the man—he has a son, a house, a Jeep, a gun. He doesn’t need a dog, too.

The entrance ramp to Route 75 is not far down the road. He speeds onto the highway as if he’s being chased, checking his rearview mirror for police cars. After a few miles he relaxes and lowers the passenger window. The dog sticks her nose into the wind. He lights another cigarette. Her ears blow back as they pull into the left lane to pass an eighteen-wheeler.

CHAPTER 3

S till in bed, Valley jolts to the banging of the kitchen screen. Her mother’s footfalls shuffle around the kitchen downstairs. A paper bag crackles and a cupboard door knocks shut, wood on wood. Her mother has been to the grocery. She knows all the sounds and can interpret their meanings. At her flute lesson last week Mr. Moore remarked on how acutely she hears. She relistens to his velvet baritone, shaping itself around those words.

Valley stretches, and her arching ribs strain against the elastic of her bra. Her phone rings, startling her, and she snatches it up. The bell is turned down as far as it goes without shutting it off.

“Sooo,” Joanie says without saying hello first. “How was it?”

“Okay,” Valley whispers back. Joanie doesn’t want the truth.

“You’re so lucky. He’s such a doll. I can’t believe you’re dating a senior. Where’d you go?”

“To the movie.” Valley glances down at the clothes she wore on the date. The waistband of her shorts is cutting into her stomach. She pops the snap and wriggles them off as she sits up.

“And…”

“Then he brought me home.”

“No stop at Millie’s? He couldn’t wait, huh?”

“I wasn’t exactly hungry.”

“I bet. So what happened? How was it?”

“Fine.”

“Come on. Tell me. Or is it sacred and you have to keep it to yourself for a while?”

Valley fingers the gold chain around her neck, searching for the star-sapphire pendant and centering it in front.

“If you don’t mind.”

“I can’t believe you landed a football player. It’s too cool. Does he have any friends he’d like to loan me?”

“Can I call you later, Joanie? I’ve got a babysitting job. I have to get showered or I’ll be late.”

“Sure, I’ll be here whenever you’re ready to unload the goods.”

Valley puts the receiver back on the cradle. Joanie gets so wrapped up in the externals. The football. The guy’s age. What she liked best about Mark Thorburn was the way he said “Hey, la-dy” with a funny Southern accent as she passed by his locker on the way to homeroom. There had been no question of a good-night kiss, let alone the stuff that Joanie hopes happened. Valley hadn’t known the script—didn’t know it was all about him. Mark would never ask her out again.

Glued, mounted and hanging on the wall beside her bed is a photo puzzle. Valley stares at herself, age three, sitting on her mother’s lap in a ruffled dress, her hair gathered in a duck barrette and sticking straight up like a fountain. The jigsaw had divided her face in two, one eye and her nose on one piece, the other eye on its interlocking mate. Maybe that’s her problem. She’s dumb-looking and schizophrenic.

“What do you think, Gerald?” she asks her current caterpillar—a spicebush swallowtail who is snacking on a sassafras branch in his stocking-covered jar. “Am I crazy?” The caterpillar continues eating, his mandibles nibbling away on the leaf. He looks bigger today. She sees the split exoskeleton, marking the fourth instar she’s counted. He’ll pupate soon. She’ll get some fresh leaves for him today. Maybe she can find him a buddy, too.

Valley throws the quilt aside and heads to the bathroom.

“You’re going where?” her mother asks while Valley rummages around the kitchen for something to eat. From her mother’s tone, Valley might have announced she’s headed somewhere outrageous—like prison. As she pours Cheerios into a ceramic bowl, she listens to the plinking sounds, so different from the tiny thuds they made falling onto plastic.

“You know the Harpers. Over on Walnut. Mrs. Harper stopped me on my way home from school and asked me to babysit today. It’s only for a few hours. I’ll still have time to practice my flute.” Valley opens the fridge for the milk. She hears her mother crinkle the box’s paper liner, then grovel around in the box for a handful. Her mother’s teeth crunch rhythmically on the mouthful as Valley pours milk into the bowl, scattering the Os to the perimeter of the dish. The no-eating-between-meals rule doesn’t apply to mothers.

“You really should have asked me first.”

Valley rolls her eyes. Does every little decision have to go before the governing board? She modulates her voice to sound like her father’s—the voice of reason calming an excitable woman. “Her sister’s getting married. Her mother-in-law caught the flu and can’t babysit. Mrs. Harper is counting on me.”

Her mother takes a package of chicken breasts from the fridge. “Mrs. Harper has an infant, Valley.”

“Yeah. So?”

“So you’ve only watched older children. You don’t know what you’re doing.” She removes the cellophane from the chicken and drops it in the sink. Watery chicken blood pools in the plastic tray beneath the mottled yellow pieces.

Valley’s lip curls at the sight. “I’m sixteen, Ma. It can’t be worse than the Johnson twins. I get one into bed and the other one’s out running around again.” Her mother is ridiculously cautious. She hadn’t allowed Valley to go to overnight parties, either—until two years after her friends were allowed. Then when she finally went, it was no big deal. So you didn’t sleep that night. You went home and took a nap.

The chicken has disgusting yellow fat in globs around the edges of the skin. Her mother pulls them off with her fingers. It looks nasty, but Valley can’t tear her eyes away. “Do you have to do that while I’m eating, Mom? It’s sooo gross.” Why is her mother wearing a nice dress to do such a messy task?

Her mother runs tap water over the breasts. “It’s only chicken. How’ll you change a diaper if you can’t stand chicken?” The blood in the tray dilutes to a pale pink.

“Lots of my friends babysit infants, Mom. Half those girls aren’t as smart as I am.” Valley puts a spoonful of Cheerios into her mouth. Joanie is regularly left to watch the Cranfords’ sprawling farm full of kids and animals.

“They have little brothers and sisters to learn on.” Her mother strips the thick skin off a breast. The flesh beneath has a vulnerable bluish-purple cast. Valley’s hand involuntarily flattens to her chest.

“Is it my fault I’m an only child?” It’s a cheap shot, and Valley feels a twinge of guilt—but mostly satisfaction—poking at the soft spot in her mother’s armor. Her mother would have loved a whole houseful of kids.

“Just don’t expect it to be easy. You can’t throw him in the crib and talk on the phone.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I’m not like that Diane Locklear. Why are you always lumping me with the crazy kids in the news?”

“I don’t. I brag about you all the time. About your flute playing. And how well you speak French.” She looks up, her face the picture of motherly pride.

“We speak English in this country, Mom. And no one in Eden cares that I play the flute.”

It’s true, what she’s saying, why she will never be popular.

“What do you think? That everyone’s going to gather at Millie’s on Saturday night to hear me play Mozart? Or how about at the Pizza Carryout? I could toodle away in front of the road map while the dropouts sprinkle mozzarella.”

“That’s honest work, Valley. And I certainly don’t insist you play the flute. You can quit this minute. I have more to do than drive you to Dayton every week for your lesson.”

“I don’t want to quit, Mom. That’s not the point.” What would she do without her flute? Being an only child is no fun at all. “And I could drive myself if you ever let me take the car out of Eden.”

Her mother lets out a long sigh. “How was your date last night? Did that boy behave himself?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Don’t get huffy. I just asked And take that necklace off. Babies break necklaces. You don’t want to lose it.”

Her mother now turns a bar of soap over and over in her palms and rubs it around between her fingers and under her nails. The suds drip on the chicken skins, and Valley grits her teeth, as if soap and chicken should somehow be kept separate.

Valley drops her bowl into the chicken mess. “I’m going to be late. Goodbye, Mom.” She listens with satisfaction when the screen door thwacks shut behind her.

Joey Harper starts fussing the second his mother hands him to Valley. Mrs. Harper retrieves her pocketbook from the dish-cluttered table and wipes her brow with her forearm. “Will you be all right?”

Valley nods. Mrs. Harper has walked her through Joey’s routine, demonstrating how to lower the gingham blind, raise the crib rail, fill the humidifier and wind the teddy’s music box. “My mother’s home in case anything happens,” Valley assures her, though she has no intention of calling home. When it comes to nervous moms, she knows the script.

Mrs. Harper looks back at the two of them on her way out the kitchen door. “He’s just been changed and fed. The phone numbers are on the wall next to the phone, and there’s a Coke for you in the fridge next to his bottle. I threw clean rompers in the dryer. They’ll be done in a bit if you need one.”

Valley crosses her arms around Joey’s diapered bum while he waggles his face into her chest. He’s a cute little guy, especially when he isn’t fussing. “I’ll be fine. Enjoy the wedding.”

Mrs. Harper sends Valley a tired smile. Valley goes to the door, shifting Joey to her hip so they can wave. She pumps Joey’s arm up and down. Joey yowls and strains toward his mother. “Hush, Joey.” Valley grips his chubby thigh. “Mummy will come back.”

Mrs. Harper backs out of the narrow driveway, honks twice, and heads down the street. Valley’s used to crying kids. At first the Johnson twins fussed when their mother left, but they’re four now and cry when their mother returns. Joey scrunches his fists into his face. Valley thinks he’s settling in, but he surprises her and exhales another loud howl. He sounds, in fact, as if he’s just warming up. Valley jiggles him on her hip. A high-pitched squeal pierces his longer wailing, dividing it in sections. She stops jiggling. The squealing continues. The pitch ascends half an octave higher on the next breath. A sweat breaks out on her upper lip. She lifts him from her hip to her chest, cuddling his head under her chin, but his screaming is too close to her ear. “Jeez, Joey, you sound like Joanie’s pigs.” She imitates the pigs. Joey stops, looks at her, then takes a breath and yowls louder. Valley tilts her head away. The roots of her hair tingle. Just when she thinks it can’t get any louder, he pulls out another stop. “This little piggy goes to market. This little piggy stays home,” she chants in his ear. Joey shrieks back. She’s heard of pitches high enough to shatter glass. Mrs. Harper will come home to a house full of broken windows.

She spies a vacuum cleaner on the dining room floor. From the crumbs on the rug, it looks as though Mrs. Harper never got to use it. Valley switches the canister on with her foot. Its whine breaks into Joey’s crying. He snorts a minute, body shuddering, then lowers his pitch to match it, just missing. The interval is awful. Valley switches it off, heads to the living room rocker and sits down. He arches his back and flails his arms, toothless gums spread wide around his bawling. His legs pedal at her stomach and thighs. He is hard to restrain, but she rocks anyway. How can a four-month-old baby be so strong? With the chair still moving, she doubles over him and shhs in his ear, but Joey can’t hear. His blue romper is damp with sweat. Tears streak down his cheeks.

Valley sings “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain” at the top of her lungs, clapping his hands and adding a “wheeha!” at the end of each line. The Johnson twins love that. Joey wails.

Facedown at her feet is a fluffy teddy bear. Valley seizes its behind and snuggles it up to Joey. “Look, here’s your bear, Joey. Let’s name your bear.” Joey bats the bear away, arms flailing. “How about Sebastian?” Valley has a bear named Sebastian. But Joey hates the name. He arches his back and howls. She tosses Sebastian on the couch.

Panic flits at the edge of her consciousness. What is wrong with him? With her? How hard should it be to rock a baby? The TV commercials with the mother smiling at her sleeping baby play lullabies in the background. It looks so serene. Chalk up another way television romanticizes everything. She should have known.

What if her mother is right? What if she can’t manage an infant? Valley’s arms feel numb, as if her blood is too thick for her veins. Her heart thuds, trying to push it around. Joey’s voice rises and falls like a siren, its overtones playing tag around the edges of her mind. She can hardly hear the voice in her own head. He’s too young to bribe with a Popsicle as she does when Mary Jane Walker has a temper tantrum. “Man, you’re really on a roll.” She tries to calm herself by laughing at him. “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.” She bobs her head up and down as if he has her doubled over. He out-yowls her laughter. What should she do? Weddings go on and on. He’s showing no signs of fatigue. What had her teacher said about this in Home Ec? She can’t think. If Joey would shut up, maybe she could remember.

Valley gets up and tromps around the living room, jostling Joey with every step. Snot is smeared down his romper. His face has turned an ugly red-purple, and she wonders that a mere fifteen minutes ago she thought he was cute. Her toes curl with every shriek. She holds him away from her ear. He looks like a slimy beet. “Stop it!” she hollers. She’s instantly ashamed.

She lays Joey on the couch next to Sebastian and watches Joey thrash while she takes several deep breaths and decides to try a bottle. His mother said he just ate, but anything is worth a try, and with all the hollering, he might have worked up an appetite. She runs to the kitchen, finds the bottle in the fridge and sticks it in the microwave. “Never mind. I’m coming back,” she yells, though she doesn’t know why it matters. Joey doesn’t care. He cries whether she’s there or not.

While the microwave ticks off the slowest minute on record, she goes to the living room door to check on him. Joey has scooted to the corner of the couch, his noise muffled slightly by Sebastian’s fur. “Good job, Sebastian.” It’s mean to say it, but it’s how she feels. Joey can’t hear her.

In the kitchen the microwave is counting down from twenty-seven seconds. Joey’s cranking isn’t as loud with the microwave humming in her ear. Twenty seconds to go. His squalls are intermittent now. Maybe she’s the problem, and he’s better off alone. Maybe she should stay in the kitchen and let him work it out. The seconds count down. The turn-table rotates, and Valley watches, mesmerized, as the bottle circles round and round. When the microwave clicks off, the house is quiet. Valley waits while the overtones of the humming die away, then inhales deeply, as if silence has become a component of air. She’s done it. Joey has finally quit howling. The silence is more than a reward. It’s heavenly bliss. She collapses into the counter. It’s been a long morning, but Joey has finally, finally gone to sleep.

She tiptoes to the living room and peeks around the doorway at him. He is a different child. Her mother always talks about how she liked to watch Valley sleep. She pulls Sebastian away from his face gently so as not to wake him. She’ll go upstairs and get his blanket. Let him nap right here. But as she’s about to leave, something about him strikes her as not quite right. For a baby that was flailing two minutes back, he is awfully still. She watches his back. Surely his back should be moving.

Holy Mother of God.

Valley runs to the phone. Dials home. Hangs up before it rings. Dials the hospital. “Middleton Community Hospital.” It’s an older woman. Valley can’t force words out. “Hello? Hello? Can I help you?” Valley hangs up. Runs to the window. Looks up and down the street. Old Mr. Carmichael is on his porch. He can’t help. He can hardly get out of the rocker.

Images of Joey in a casket rise in her mind’s eye. The room is closing in, but she refuses to faint. She snatches Joey up. His head lops to one side. She lifts him higher, his chest to her cheek, but can hear nothing but the ringing in her ears. His body is so heavy. “Oh, God,” she shrieks, thumping his back. “Someone help me!”

Joey shudders. One leg pedals.

At least she thinks so. She may have jostled him. She thumps his back again. Rubs in a circle.

He sputters. Coughs.

Tears pop to Valley’s eyes.

Joey takes a deep breath. A year passes while Valley waits. He exhales.

“Good boy, Joey. You are such a good boy.” The tears break from her eyes and disappear in the nap of his sleeper. Joey inhales again. Exhales. Double shudders. Inhales.

He is breathing. In, out. In, out. He opens his eyes. Looks into her face. Screws up his face and mewls at her. She runs to the phone. Dials home. “Mom. I need you to come. Joey’s having a bad time.”

The familiar thrum of the Galaxy engine out on the Harpers’ driveway comforts Valley—like the pendulum of the cuckoo clock over the couch at home. Joey is still sobbing when her mother bursts through the door. “It’s awful hot in here, Valley,” she says. “Take your vest off, lamb. You’ll die of the heat.” She takes Joey and cuddles him to her bosom, crooning lulling nonsense into his ear. He nuzzles into her like a favorite pillow, wiping snot all over her dress. Valley retreats to the couch, stuffing the guilty Sebastian behind her.

“Don’t smother him, Ma.”

“He’s just rooting around, goosie. You don’t have to worry.” Her mother stands in the middle of the room, swaying gently. Joey’s sobs, muffled by her breast, change to rhythmic whimpering, then slow to occasional gasps.

“Has he been doing this long?” Her mother looks straight at her for the first time.

Valley nods and looks away. She takes a Good Housekeeping from the end table as an excuse. There’s a picture of Princess Diana on the cover, in a green maternity dress with huge white polka dots and a white sailor collar. Motherhood is everywhere.

“You should have called me sooner,” her mother says. “A baby always knows inexperienced arms.” She looks at Joey. “Hasa been ’creamin’ and hollerin’, lambkin? Whatsa matter widda big boy? Huh? Whatsa matter?” she croons into the top of his head, punctuating each question with kisses on top of his head. “I think he wants a bottle, Valley. Did Mrs. Harper make one up?”

Valley gets the bottle from the microwave. Her mother settles into the rocker and tickles his cheek with the nipple. He turns and takes it into his mouth, sucking eagerly. She sings “Rock-a-bye Baby” in her thin soprano as he sucks.

Valley pictures Joey dumped from the cradle and lying limp on the ground, blue as a Smurf. “Mom, don’t sing that. It’s awful.”

“It’s just a song, silly. He doesn’t understand the words.”

“Well, I do. Don’t sing it.”

“He got you real upset, didn’t he, lamb? I don’t know who needs the rocking more—Joey or you.”

Valley folds her hands, clenching her muscles around the knot in her stomach so it won’t unravel and give her away. The rocker’s creaking and the sound of Joey’s sucking calm her. She suddenly feels exhausted.

“Look at him, Valley, honey,” her mother says. “Isn’t he precious? Look at his little wrists. Like someone put a rubber band around his plump little arm. And his knuckles. Little dimples. Everything perfect.”

Valley looks at the two of them, Joey’s body merging into her mother’s flowered dress.

“And he smells so good. Aah. You smelled so good I thought I’d go wild. Your scent was all over your blankets, and when I went to put them in the washer, I’d stand there and grieve that I was about to wash you away. I had to go cuddle you as soon as I’d done it.”

Valley can’t imagine sticking her face in peed-on baby blankets. Face it—whatever it is that makes women go ape over babies and cancel their lives for slavery to poop and snot, she doesn’t have it.

Joey falls asleep with the bottle in his mouth. Her mother removes it and gets up from the rocker, his head cradled in her elbow and his bottom in her other palm. “Sit down here, Valley. You take him. He’s fine now.” She motions to the chair with her head.

Valley seats herself in the chair and takes Joey back. He stays asleep, though during the switch his head lolls dangerously to one side.

“That’s right. There.” Her mother props Joey’s head between Valley’s small breast and her arm. Valley tenses so his head won’t move. “Perfect.” Her mother stands back and regards the two of them with her head cocked to one side.

Valley’s arm aches, but she doesn’t move.

“Now rock, lamb. Relax. It feels good. Enjoy the motion.”

Valley pushes off with her toe.

“You should be fine now. Call me back if you need me.”

Valley wishes her mother would stay. She doesn’t want to be alone with Joey. Doesn’t trust herself. But now that Joey is sleeping, her mother will be suspicious if she asks her to stay. She can’t risk that.

The Galaxy disappears down the road, and Valley is left with Joey and the creaking rocker. She looks down at the sleeping child. How long had her Home Ec teacher said a baby could go without oxygen before brain damage? Was it five minutes? Fifteen? Longer for babies than for adults? How long had Joey gone without breathing? Valley mentally retraces her steps once it got silent—to the living room, to the phone. She accounts for the time it takes to dial the two calls, allows herself some time to think. It can’t have been that long. Not fifteen minutes.

Joey looks so peaceful, lying in her arms. The rocker creaks and Valley hears a rhyme.

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn;

The sheep’s in the meadow,

The cow’s in the corn.

Where’s the little boy that looks after the sheep?

He’s under Sebastian, fast asleep.

CHAPTER 4

R ose drives home in a daze, choosing to take the long way around. She can feel Joey’s plump calf in the hollow of her palm and his hot breath on her neck. His body had grown weightier as he’d relaxed, like in Valley’s infancy when the two of them had napped together. Valley nursed, then dropped off to sleep in Rose’s arms. Rose dozed, too, in a blissful half sleep, wakened by Valley’s slightest movement. Those were the days. She knew exactly where Valley was every minute.

Farmland stretches out for miles on either side of the roadway. The fields, usually nappy with soybean plants by the second week in June, are bogs of puddles. Rose wonders if the seeds have rotted in the ground. Her tires zhush through a puddle, throwing water onto the wild grapevine growing over the roadside fence posts. The stench of hen manure from Gabriel’s turkey farm is stronger downwind. The sky arches overhead in a blue dome, its clouds unaffected by the humidity that rises from the swampy earth like bad breath.

The summer Valley was conceived was different—hot but not humid. The water in Kaiser Lake was silky and warm; the perfume of lilac and honeysuckle hung in the air. Dishes clinked on screen porches around the lake as people lingered late over coffee and dessert, listening to the hiss of locusts. On such a night, Rose thinks, no one should be held responsible for what happened. And though she’d been terrified at the time, Valley was a keeper. If a baby was the punishment for her sin, she should sin more often. It was no wonder she couldn’t confess it.

Rose sees a woman standing in the road ahead, waving her arms frantically. She knows it’s Helen from the long legs and hair even before she’s close enough to see her features. Rose brakes and pulls up next to her friend. “I thought you’d be at work.”

“My car’s in the garage, so I’m walking home for lunch. Bethany’s home alone.”

Rose has never seen Helen eat anything but yogurt, standing at the fridge in the Laundromat office—unless you count the sunflower seeds she bakes to chew on when she can’t smoke. To Rose, yogurt isn’t lunch. Certainly nothing to walk home for. But that’s why Helen has pretty thighs and hers are all mottled.

“Get in. I’ll drive you. I meant to call you anyway. I may be gone for a few days—on a church retreat—so don’t worry if you can’t reach me.” She’s not really leaving home, but if she admits to secluding herself, Helen will think she’s as crazy as the old woman robbing the church Dumpster.

Helen plants her tidy hips on the seat. “Oh, too bad. Just when Rob’s arrived. Have you seen him yet? He stopped into the laundry with his stuff for me to wash, and guess what? He recognized me!” Rose glances at her. Helen looks great in the sleeveless black tank she’s wearing with her jeans. At times like this, Rose can’t think what she likes about Helen. They wouldn’t be friends if they hadn’t been sitting together pregnant in Dr. Burns’s office that year. Eleven months after she married Carl, Helen delivered Bethany and left the hospital wearing her jeans—which, at the moment, seems like a pretty good reason to hate her.

“He said he’d know my hair anywhere,” Helen brags. Her hair really is pretty, but it’s sickening how she relishes every little detail like Joanie Cranford. Helen wastes what little money she has on fancy botanical shampoos so her hair smells of windfall apples one day, ripe peaches the next.

“He called me Helen Dudley,” Helen prattles on. “Maybe I should have changed my name back when Carl left, but after all those years of being called Milk Dud and Dudley-Do-Wrong, I was glad enough to be rid of it. He hadn’t heard I’d married. He says he remembers the name Slezac, but only the name—he couldn’t put a face to Carl. When you’re not in the same class you don’t really know each other. Anyway, he was sorry to hear about my divorce.”

“Is he married?” The question comes out in a little half voice, and Rose clears her throat to cover, as if she’s fighting a frog.

“He didn’t say so.” Helen prides herself on being the first to know the town gossip, and Rose eggs her on with a few more questions. “There’s nobody with him,” Helen says. “No woman, I mean. He’s got some kid along, though.”

Rose lets that sink in. “What do you mean kid?”

“Just some boy.” To Helen it’s a toss-off. “You know. Sixteen, maybe.”

“Oooh, Bethany’s age,” Rose says, filling her voice with innuendo. Really she’s worried that Valley has a half brother. What if he looks like Valley?

“You don’t really think—” Helen says, though she’s obviously conjuring a romance for Bethany. “Maybe I should invite them over. You know, for a friendly dinner.”

Rose pictures the TV dinners she’s seen Helen stack neatly in her grocery cart, filing each item as if she’s lining up decimal points after counting the Laundromat’s change. “It might be kind of obvious,” Rose says, but when has Helen ever been afraid of being obvious?

Helen lights a cigarette and dangles her right hand out the open window. “If I’m not obvious, Bethany won’t get it. I’ve never seen such a backward child. She never brings a soul home with her.”

“Maybe she needs time alone. Some people do.”

Rose turns off the main road and pulls over at the end of Helen’s dirt driveway. The tree branches hang so low in Helen’s front yard it’s hard to see the brown bungalow Helen’s grandfather left her. Her sunflowers and zinnias are spiking up already in the one sunny spot in the yard, the planter box over the septic tank. Gopher, Helen’s chocolate Lab, comes bounding out to the car, tail wagging so hard his body wriggles all over.

Helen gets out of the car, patting Gopher with the hand holding her cigarette. “Flim Flannigan died last night. Did you know?”

“I knew someone had. He’s suffered so long. And he had to be lonely after Louise died.”

The dog’s tail beats a knocking rhythm against the car door, and Rose fears dents. She wishes Helen would discipline her dog. Helen bends over to look in the window. “It’s too bad you have to go right now. Rob asked for you.”

Rose waits anxiously by the window for the deliveryman. She has cleaned the little room off the den that stores miscellaneous items: the boxed-up Mr. Coffee, albums of old photographs, a file box of bank statements and insurance records, a noisy window fan, two antique chairs with broken-out cane seats and three boxes of Christmas decorations. It took ten minutes to move the stuff to one side. Then she hung a picture of Our Lady with a mother-of-pearl rosary draped over the frame and a photo of Valley and herself stuck in its bottom corner.

The truck turns in, crunching gravel. Two men come to the door carrying the frame and spring between them. She leads them to the storage room and points to the corner where she wants it set up. They hand her the Mary Theresa tag, lay the metal spring between the head and foot frames and screw it together. They make a second trip to the truck and return with a thin mattress. This they lay in place, performing their duties solemnly, as if part of a ritual. Rose wonders where such men come from—men who don’t roll their eyes at a woman’s faith. Such a man would sit beside her in church. He would lead her up to Communion. Pray aloud at the dinner table. She can’t imagine how that would be. It’s not marriage as she knows it. She’s not sure what it is. First Communion practice maybe, at age six. The boys and girls processed up the aisle, and the priest putting Necco wafers on their tongues so they could practice holding the host in their mouths without chewing.

Rose watches the men leave, then makes the sign of the cross over the bed.

She looks at the tag. Under Sister Mary Theresa’s name is a quote in cramped handwriting: True love grows by sacrifice, and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction, the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes—St. Theresa, the Little Flower. It’s uncanny—exactly why she bought the bed. It even came with directions, in case she didn’t understand.

This room, the simple bed, feels removed from her doubts about a God she cannot see. She covers the mattress with line-dried white sheets and smooths the rumples. She covers the sheets with a white-on-white quilt from her hope chest. It’s one she made in Home Ec before she learned how to piece. Never before has she used it. The stitches are big and clumsy, but there’s an innocence to them that helps her begin again. She tucks the overhanging edges under the mattress with perfect hospital corners. A clean envelope it is, and she the letter that will fit inside. A petition. To Jesus.

Rose kneels down and runs her hands over the quilt top. The fabric is soft like the batiste of her First Communion dress. After the service, her parents gave a party with a cake covered in white frosting roses. A photographer followed her around that afternoon, telling her to smile and snapping her picture in her white dress and lace veil. The veil was gathered on a plastic headband that pinched over her ears and made her head ache.

When she and Everett eloped, her only veil was the lace curtain she’d swiped from her mother’s linen closet to wrap herself in for their first night at Beetley’s Hotel on Indian Lake. She wore it wrapped sari-style and flung over her shoulder. Everett had unwrapped her gently, handling her like fragile lace, as if she, too, needed to be returned, untorn. Everett was different from Rob.

Oh, Rob. Only her head had been above water when they got to kissing. She had hardly noticed when the straps of her two-piece slid from her shoulders. They never found her bathing suit top, and she’d worn Rob’s T-shirt home, her beach towel wrapped around her shoulders so her mother wouldn’t notice.

Rose shakes her head. This is why she bought the bed—to purge those memories. She’ll stay in this room and pray to the Holy Mother who bore a child and yet was without sin. She’ll persevere until her heart is pure, not divided. Until her flesh is subdued. Maybe Rob will leave town meanwhile so she’s not tempted. That would be a mercy as great as Everett’s having left town for the day. That in itself was a miracle.

She ticks off the items she’ll need for her retreat and rises obediently to collect them. Her missal is in the drawer of her bedside stand, dog-eared and stuffed full of the holy cards her mother collected at funeral homes and tucked into her birthday cards. They spill out on the floor—haloed images of Mary in blue drapery, Jesus with a lamb slung over his shoulders, Saint Francis feeding the birds and Saint Clare, barefoot and wearing sackcloth, placing the Blessed Sacrament between a soldier and the convent wall. Rose puts Clare on top to keep her marauder away.

The screen door bangs shut down in the kitchen.

“Valley? Is that you, lamb?” she calls down the stairs.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How’d you make out with Joey?”

Valley appears in the doorway, pulling her fingers through her sweaty hair. “He puked all over me. I’ve got to take a shower.”

“Babies spit up all the time. Especially formula-fed babies. That’s why breast feeding is best.” She likes to talk about these things with Valley, to pass on the womanly arts.

“Mom? How long can a person survive without oxygen?”

“How would I know that, lamb? I’m not a doctor.”

“I just thought you might have read it somewhere. You’re always telling me stories about kids getting shut up in old refrigerators or car trunks.”

“Were you thinking of hiding in the trunk?”

There’s silence for a moment, then Valley giggles a bit too loudly. “Bach didn’t know that flutists need air. I wondered how long I can play without breathing. You know, without brain damage.”

“I told you to take the summer off, lamb. You need a break sometimes.”

Joey’s mucous is all over the front of Rose’s dress. She puts it in with the dry cleaning, removes her slip and looks down at the bulge of flesh pooching from the waistband of her satin panties. They’re not exactly nun’s underpants. As she peels them down her body, her belly protrudes with its silvery stretch marks, as if she’s swallowed a winter squash. She pokes through the snarl of undies in her drawer, burrowing beneath the skimpy nighties Everett buys, and picks out a modest white cotton bra, panties and a plain half-slip. She stands behind the door to put them on, in case Valley should come barging in with more silly questions, then chooses a shirt and denim skirt as closest to what the nun’s wear now that they’ve shed their habits. She likes skirts anyway. It’s not that she thinks it’s wrong to dress like a man, though her mother didn’t own a pair of pants. It’s that jeans dig into her waist and hug her thighs when she sits down. She’s cooler and more comfortable in a skirt.

Her best rosary is under her pillow, one her mother kept draped over the radio through the fifties when Bishop Sheen came on every day to address the faithful. It was made by a monk in Normandy after World War II and feels like a piece of history. The beads are made of melted-down bullets, and large iron nails form the cross. The contorted Body is hammered from brass and welded to the nails at the hands and feet. As a child she liked to finger it, to peer through the tiny space between the Body and the cross.

Downstairs, she lays her supplies down on the table, next to the fabric she’d been cutting for a Jacob’s ladder quilt. Planning it seems long ago, though it was really only a day. She had been excited about the project, so excited she’d forgotten to eat lunch while she’d graphed it out. Then she made a cutting mistake on a flocked purple remnant she had been saving for just the right quilt. She won’t get the ladder out of it now, and she feels like throwing it all away. She takes up her kaleidoscope, hoping another color combination will capture her. But every time the purple falls in with the blues she feels complete. There’s nothing else she likes as well. It’s all ruined. Tears spring to her eyes, and she swallows again and again. She’d been tired when she made the mistake, too tired to think straight and distracted by the boy who’d come for Valley.

She hopes Valley stays upstairs, because it’s stupid to cry over a quilt. She’s thankful Everett’s gone. Neither of them understands that it’s not just a quilt to Rose. It’s the death of a perfect idea. Now, no matter who raves about the quilt—even if it takes another first at the county fair—it will always look second-rate to Rose.

She hears water rushing through the pipes. Valley is in the shower. Rose goes into the kitchen to get sandwich bags for her little piles of triangles and squares but forgets what she’s after and opens the refrigerator. The sliced turkey will only go bad if she doesn’t eat it. Everett isn’t coming home and Valley doesn’t like it.

She makes herself a turkey sandwich with cheese and lettuce, spreading mayonnaise to the edges of the rye bread with her favorite spreader. A bite at a time, she savors each mouthful as if it’s her last. Rob asked for her. Helen said so. She washes her sandwich plate and pictures his backlit figure walking toward her down the sidewalk. A gold chain glints at the neck of his green T. His jeans bulge slightly at the zipper. But it’s that moment when their eyes met she wants to capture. Her insides flutter as they had in junior high—before a test, when a cute boy walked by or whenever she saw Mary Sue Horton come toward her. “Stop it!” Rose says aloud to the dish brush. She dries the plate, puts it back on the shelf and hurries to her cell as if Rob is in hot pursuit. The air is close in the little room. That’s okay. It’s part of the discipline.

Kneeling beside her bed, Rose bows over her rosary. She says the Apostle’s Creed on the crucifix—fingering the sharp angle of Christ’s knees, the prickly points of the thorns on his brow—a Hail Mary on each of the little beads and an Our Father and Glory Be on each of the larger beads. She repeats them for Mr. Flannigan’s soul. All of it is exhausting, her crying, her praying. She wonders if it’s wrong to pray lying down. What did sick people do? Stroke patients? Mr. Flannigan? He certainly hadn’t knelt. She lies flat on her back, her palms together, upright over her ribs. Her shirt absorbs the sweat on her back. She recites the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, drilled into her by Sister Mary Thomas beginning in second grade. “Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things.” When she’s repeated all of lesson one, she repeats the Ten Commandments, the seven sacraments, the seven virtues and the seven deadly sins. She intends to confess on each one, beginning with gluttony and citing the box of chocolates, but before she gets to lust, Rose dozes.

In the dim light of consciousness she sees bicycle wheels turning, turning, revolving so fast the spokes become a blur and disappear. Valley is a baby, strapped into a child seat fixed to the rear fender. Rose is naked, perched on the seat, steering. She rounds a corner, bicycle leaning until it tips over and the curb reaches for the two of them, smacks her in the jaw and dislodges her teeth. She wriggles each tooth in turn, finds she can remove it, looks at the disgusting V-shaped root, then fits it back into its socket. Valley is sprawling on a lawn overgrown with enormous dandelions that make soft yellow pillows for her head. “Poor baby,” Rose says, picking Valley up, but Valley cannot hear her. Rose looks in her ear. There’s a dandelion inside. Rose plucks at it with her fingers first, then with tweezers, but only manages to shred it. Fragile yellow fibers stick to the tweezer tips like duck fluff. She digs deeper into Valley’s ear, gouging at yellow, tweaking, pulling. But the dandelion is stubborn. It gives up its nap, but it will not budge.

CHAPTER 5

P ort Clinton is new to Everett, but the AAA magazine has a good map. The air is much cooler by the lake. Drier, too. Good thing with the dog. Everett drives to the docks, parks in the shade of a large tree, rolls the windows partway down and pats the dog. “I won’t be long. You’ll be fine,” he says in the singsong of doggy talk. She wags her back half, barks once and watches while he grabs a jacket from his trunk.

Everett buys a ticket to Put-in-Bay on the Jet Express, a jet-powered catamaran said to cross the harbor in twenty-two minutes. Onboard, he stands with the other tourists and watches wake spew from the engine before churning back into the bay. The passengers wear colorful windbreakers, orange and yellow, green and pink. Women pull hoods up over their blowing hair. Everett leaves his jacket hanging open. Cold is a woman thing.

Up ahead, the Perry Memorial rises from the center of downtown Put-in-Bay like a giant pencil, poised to connect the plump clouds into meaningful patterns. Everett thinks like that—connecting poles, configuring electrical circuits, though he rarely insists the patterns have meaning. Not like Rosie, who finds significance in every event. He finds her interpretation of coincidence silly and trivial—the abracadabra of child play, like expecting sense of nursery rhymes or jump-rope chants.

When the Jet Express docks and its engines shut down, the organ band of Kimberly’s Carousel—noted in the AAA guide for its all-wood horses—mixes with the seagulls’ laughter. At King’s Island Amusement Park Valley used to cling to the carousel pole, her neck craning to spot Rosie every turn round the circle. That’s not what he came for.

He spies the parachutes billowing from their anchors down on the beach. He hurries to the dock to register, but when he arrives there’s no line. The air is too chilly. He won’t bother changing into swim trunks.

Everett pays his fee and signs the waiver before he loses his nerve. Out in the water, the boat motor revs while bare-chested boys with Greek letters on their caps snap him into a life vest. The boy maneuvering the boat keeps it pointing into the wind. The motor settles into a glubbing gurgle Everett can hardly hear over his heartbeat. He is about to do it. To take off…to fly…to soar with the seagulls—free of earth, gravity, his body. The boys tell him to step into a harness. He threads one leg, then the other through the leg straps. His bare feet look white. One boy tightens the cinch belt under his gut and adjusts the strap that runs between his legs. A red-yellow-and-blue chute billows out behind him, not yet clipped to rings on his harness. The wind riffles the edges of the chute. His mouth is suddenly dry. Two boys clip his chute on, holding him down with all their weight. “Hold on to those straps by your ears,” the tall one says.

“Have fun, big guy.”

They halloo to the driver. Release him as the boat takes off into the wind. Cold air rushes his face as the chute lifts him into the air. His weight settles into the sling seat. His knuckles whiten around the handholds. The beach disappears and he is over water. The waves reach for his feet, then curl into white fringe. He kicks his feet at the nothingness that suspends him. The water drops farther below. The waves look like ripples. He glances back. The shoreline forms a crescent behind him. The Perry Monument is not so tall after all. The red-and-white carousel awning rotates slowly, its pie-shaped wedges emerging from a stationary center point. Its calliope is silent now. Even the noise of the boat motor has faded away.

It is very still.

The article hadn’t mentioned stillness. His skin breaks out in goose bumps. He’d expected rushing wind, rocking him in the harness swing, his hair blowing every which way. Everett has never heard such silence. Even in farm country in the middle of winter there are sounds—the echo of a car door slamming, a train whistle, the snap of icicles, the wind wiffling across stubbly fields or snapping frozen branches. The silence threatens to swallow him. He can’t relax and enjoy the view in the face of such calm. How does he know he’s still living? That he hasn’t died of heart failure? Maybe he was wrong about heaven—all his visions of angels and cherubim, the many-headed monsters from Revelations, the only book of the Bible he’s read. Maybe the giant throne room, the old man speaking in a booming voice amidst sulfur and magical creatures and terror and judgment is Oz, not heaven. Maybe heaven is a lot of nothing. A total void.

“Anybody home?” Everett calls into the stillness. The question goes nowhere. Maybe it’s trapped in his head, like the sound of his voice when he plugs his ears with his fingers. Maybe he hasn’t spoken at all. He lets go of the strap and holds his ears with his palms, then hollers.

The boat down on the water speeds around in circles. To his right a gull flaps its wings a few times, then glides, riding an updraft before circling around and descending to the water. For a minute it grazes the surface, then splashes and disappears. It surfaces and flaps off with a fish in its mouth. Everett envies its fluid movement, its freedom. He caws like the gull and flaps his arms. He pictures himself bailing out, as he had from swings when he was a child, then jackknifing into free fall, arms and legs spread wide to embrace the approaching earth like skydivers in James Bond movies.

Everett quells the urge. From this height, he’d never survive. Suicide is the coward’s way out. But if he were closer to the water…the boat heads toward shore. He’ll descend soon. He doesn’t have much time. The buckles are locked into each other. He kicks his feet and plucks at the webbing threaded through the buckles on the crotch strap. Finally he pulls it free. The waist strap is all that remains. It’s tight, and he can’t see it over the bulk of his life jacket to loosen it. While he fumbles with it, jerking and cursing, the boat slows down. Everett’s chute drops like a reeled-in kite. His time is short. The wind blows him toward shore. The beach approaches. The frat boys gesture, pointing and waving their arms. They holler and motion to pull down, like a train engineer on the whistle. He pulls all right—at the strap under his gut.

The boat idles offshore. The chute drops farther. The engine glubs. The calliope frolics. He’s almost too late, too close. Then the strap gives and he’s free. He thrusts his head out to propel his weight forward, spreads his arms and legs, then smacks on the blue-gray mirror.

When Everett regains consciousness, a frat boy’s face is enlarged in the center of an expanse of sky. “He’s coming to.” The boy’s voice is soprano and distorted. Other faces appear in a circle around his. Water runs from the kid’s sun-bleached hair down his neck and chest. The seagulls’ cries no longer sound like laughter. The clamor of the calliope mocks at his pain.

“Back off, everybody,” the kid orders. The perimeter of faces clears out. “You okay, mister?” His eyes look earnest, as though the answer matters.

Yeah, Everett mouths. He has no air in his lungs. His head aches. His skin stings all over.

“What the hell were you trying to do? Are you fuckin’ crazy, man?”

Everett gasps to breathe. There’s a crushing weight on his chest.

“That life jacket saved you. Lie still. The ambulance will be here soon.”

Everett heaves himself partway up. The kid pushes on his shoulders to lay him back down, but Everett resists. “No hospital.” He shakes the kid’s hands off. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. They have to check you out. Insurance stuff.”

“Hell with insurance…They’re not…checking me out… I’m outa here…soon as I get…my breath.”

A siren is coming toward the docks. Everett rolls onto his hands and knees, struggles up and staggers in the sand. The kid is on his tail, fussing at him.

Everett waves him off. “Beat it, kid. And while you’re at it, get a real job.”

“Crazy bastard.”

Everett grabs his duffel off the sand and heads for the bathhouse. When he looks back, the kid is staring after him. Everett hates the boy’s sculpted chest and taut, square jaw.

Back in the car, Everett cuddles his dog. The wind was cold on the trip across the bay, and the afternoon sun feels good, baking him through the windshield. Now that he’s been to Oz and back, he’s decided to name the dog Kansas. She puts her front paws in his lap and licks the sweat from his palms. Her tongue massages his calluses, but its grainy texture feels a bit removed until she moves to the skin on his wrist. His skin stings all over where he hit the water. His stomach is sour, his saliva bitter, but he’s not sorry he did it. The way that boy fussed to save him, maybe there’s something of his life left to salvage.

CHAPTER 6

V alley stops playing scales on her flute and listens. The house is so quiet her mother must be out weeding. She puts the flute down on her bed, crawls across it to the puzzle portrait and lifts it off the wall. Her father hates this picture. They had it made at Sears when they were all dressed up for Mother’s Day one year, but he had refused to do it again. He couldn’t stand the photographer tapping his chin to adjust the angle of his head and telling him to smile. And he didn’t like the way Valley’s hair stuck up from the duck barrette. “You just don’t know what’s cute,” her mother told him one night when they were both in her room, kissing her goodnight.

“Hair doesn’t grow up,” he said. “She’s cute the way she is.”

Maybe the picture is why he never comes in her room anymore. She doesn’t blame him. She can’t think why she’s left it up. She turns the picture over and removes the clips and the cardboard to get to the puzzle itself. Once it’s free of the frame, she props it on her pillow for a last look, makes a fist and punches through her baby face. A puzzle bracelet circles her wrist.

When Valley withdraws her hand, her pillowcase shows through. Her mother’s lap now holds a white balloon. Tears well up in her eyes, and through their watery blur, it is young Mrs. Harper sitting there with a hole in her lap. And Joey’s body without a head. She screams, but no sound comes from her mouth. It stays trapped in her head.

She sweeps the picture off her pillow and puts her Sebastian bear there instead. Frantically she searches for a place to hide it. The closet and bureau are no good; her mother will find it when she puts the laundry away. The mattress. She puts the ruined picture under it and drops the mattress. It will do until she can find a better place. She straightens the quilt. Pieces of her face still lay on the quilt top as if somehow part of its bear-paw pattern. She tries to fit them back together, but where her fist struck, the cardboard tongues are bent backward. She puts them in her top drawer under the balls of matched socks.

If only she could go back to a time when she didn’t know about today. One day would do. She’d been a better person the day before. A strange pressure in her chest, like a giant spring winding ever tighter, threatens to uncoil and wang her all over the room. She reaches for her flute, as if it might anchor her, prevent her from hitting the walls.

A Bach bourrée is on her music stand, but the endless eighth notes are more than she can face. She turns instead to a sinfonia, a slow, dreamy piece she can almost play by heart.

As her breath funnels through the cylinder, Joey is seated before her, propped on the pillow in place of Sebastian. At first he is huge, a burden she must drag behind her through humid air and acres of boggy farmland. She slogs through the complications and resolutions of the melody until her tone becomes full and the music takes over. She allows its power to lift her to the peak of each phrase before falling freely down the backside. Joey is now light, full of helium. He floats up from the bog and is borne aloft on the sound of her voice. Eyes closed and body swaying, she woos him, leaning into the phrases, rocking him gently on the melody.

The vision of Joey fades and she is playing for Mr. Moore, but his chest is expanding, his face reddening from inhaling for her without exhaling into a flute. She plays on, weaving through the andante. Mr. Moore’s face is purple now, but still she plays on, bewitched by the sound she’s making—until he turns blue and keels over. She drops her flute and runs downstairs. In the refrigerator are two bottles of her father’s beer. She uncaps them both and downs the first, not thinking how she’ll replace them. The taste is nasty, but she doesn’t care. She’s after the drowsy, calm effect she’s seen on her dad, the way he cares less with each beer as a Reds game wears on. She holds her nose to down the second bottle. She takes the bottles out to the garbage can, not quite able to be as quiet as she’d like to be, though nothing like calm has come over her yet. She buries them deep in a green plastic bag. Her mother is nowhere in sight. The backyard is empty.

Their two-story Victorian rises behind her like an empty tomb. She wonders where her mother is, why her father is gone on a Saturday. The company of a caterpillar isn’t enough. The spring inside her chest begins to tighten. Her breath comes in spurts. She can’t go inside. It’s better to fly apart in the wide world, where she’ll bounce off the soft blue of the sky’s dome. She heads down the driveway, one step, then the next. She’ll keep walking, forever if she has to. It’s the one thing she’s certain she can do.

Walking helps. She focuses on her breathing. Inhale one, two, three, four; exhale one, two, three, four, walking and breathing in 4/4 time. She changes to 3/4, bending her knee on the accented first beat and then taking the next two counts of the measure on her tiptoes. She sings a polonaise and is surprised at the end to find herself in town. In front of the movie theater, a long-haired boy leans up against the brick, a boy she can’t remember seeing before. He’s watching her with a blurry, bemused expression, one thumb hooked in the waist of his beltless jeans. His mouth curves up in a lazy grin.

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