“Take both the dogs,” Hester said.
“No, the kids get too cranked up with both of them.” She gave the high chair a lick and a promise with the dishcloth and lifted Cordelia out of it by her armpits, inhaling her sweet-sour baby scent like smelling salts, a bracing relief. With Cordie on her hip, Dellarobia whistled softly and called Roy by name as she left the kitchen, telling Charlie to stay down. To her dismay, Crystal rose as if she too had been whistled up, announcing she had to go get her boys too. She followed outside and stood by as Dellarobia opened the back door of her station wagon for Roy, then buckled Cordie into her car seat. Dellarobia could feel the rain in little icy pricks on the gap between her sweatshirt and jeans when she leaned into the car.
“You buckle her in, even just to go to your house?” Crystal asked.
“Ninety percent of accidents happen within one mile of home.” Dellarobia had no idea if this was true, and honestly might not have bothered with the car seat if she hadn’t had the world’s laziest mother in attendance. Someone had to set an example.
“It’s not a mile to your house. It’s like, two hundred feet.”
“What’s up, Crystal? First and third grade don’t let out until afternoon. Don’t tell me Jazon and Mical got demoted back to half-day kindergarten.”
Crystal rearranged her face, going for wide-eyed and perky. “I just thought we could talk for a few minutes.”
“What would you like to talk about?”
“Nothing. Just, stuff.”
Dellarobia got in the car and sat with the door open, hands on the steering wheel, waiting. She knew Crystal wanted something; the girl was permanently set on intake mode. Dellarobia went for preemptive. “I am not babysitting your kids.”
“I’m not asking!”
“Could I get that in writing?”
The rain was starting to pick up, but Crystal remained planted. People always laughed at rain and said, “You won’t melt,” but Crystal’s body mass was probably 35 percent makeup and hair products. She actually might melt. Dellarobia sighed. “Get in.”
Crystal walked around to the passenger’s side, flopped in, and conspicuously clicked her seat belt. “Do you really have to be so . . .”
They completed the ninety-second ride to Dellarobia’s driveway before Crystal had advanced this line of inquiry. Roy’s black-and-white body poured out of the car and swirled in figure eights on the lawn, eager for whatever project he was here to begin.
“Roy, down,” Dellarobia said, and he lay flat on the watery lawn before she even had both syllables out. The grass was still faintly green, not yet winter-killed, as they’d had no snow or even a hard frost. Cordie didn’t have a proper winter coat, just doubled-up sweatshirts. It wasn’t negligence—the kids truly had not needed bundling up yet, the weather had failed to nudge them to Target or the Second Time Around shop for that purpose. The idea of December seemed impossible. A few times when people had asked if she was ready for Christmas, she’d actually drawn a blank: ready for what? And of course felt idiotic afterward. People automatically estimate a mom’s IQ at around her children’s ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size. But the weird weather must have bewildered everyone to some extent. On stepping outdoors she sometimes had to struggle a few seconds trying to place the month of the year, and Cub had said the same. It felt like no season at all. The season of burst and leaky clouds.
Dellarobia set her mind to the worries at hand: Preston’s first time on the bus. The driver wouldn’t know his stop unless she stood out here by the road. It might even come early. The rain was getting serious, but she couldn’t risk going in the house for an umbrella. A five-year-old was too young for the bus. What had she been thinking? Sending him off among strangers was chilling enough, without some distracted bus driver in the mix. She planted herself at the end of the drive between their mailbox and a big old maple, and sent Crystal after the umbrella.
Crystal went in the house and took her sweet time about it. Dellarobia unzipped her hoodie and draped it over Cordie, who was getting soaked. The cattle in the waterlogged pasture across the road raised their heads in brief attention, welcoming her to the sad-sack club. Her phone buzzed, and she fished it from her shoulder bag left-handed with Cordie on her other hip. A text from Dovey: MOSES WAS A BASKET CASE. Dovey swore these adages were genuine, sighted during church drive-bys, usually on her way to work, and maybe that was true. The commercial-type marquees seemed to draw churches into the same competitive cleverness that ruled all advertising. But she suspected a Dovey original here. With her one free thumb she texted back: U R 2.
At length Crystal arrived with the umbrella and they huddled under its greenly lit shelter. It was close quarters in there, given the dimensions of Crystal’s hair. Roy sat obediently at Dellarobia’s knee but sidled close against her leg as the dampness grew. Cordie, from her hipbone perch, waved at the passing cars and rhythmically kicked her muddy shoes against Dellarobia’s thigh. Every pair of jeans she owned was stained with footprints. If she was already a doormat, were her kids then doomed?
A red Chevy pickup slowed almost to a stop, at such close range they could hear the slapping windshield wipers and see the guy inside, checking them out on the drive-by. For heaven’s sakes, mothers of children, waiting for a school bus.
“That was Ace Sayers,” Crystal said, when the truck had passed. “Somebody told me he had a colonstopy.”
“Thank you for sharing.”
“So,” Crystal said. “I was going to ask you something.”
“Imagine my surprise.”
“Dell, I swear. Just because everybody at church thinks you’re a saint? I’m sorry. But I don’t see why I have to kiss your butt.”
“Alrighty then, don’t. Don’t call me Dell, though. I got burned on that one when I started going out with Cub.”
“How come?”
She sang it: “The farmer in the dell!”
“Oh, right. Ick.”
“Ick is one way to put it. And not Dellie, either. That would be one of those places where they hand you a sandwich.”
Crystal gave her a worried glance. “What is this, the sign-up sheet for hanging out with you?”
“Yes.”
They stood in silence while two more vehicles passed, both driven by elderly women, thankfully. Dellarobia wished she were not defensive about her name. In high school when the popular girls all won pert little tags like “Liz” or “Suze,” she’d hoped for something snappier too, but that never worked out. Dellarobia she was to be, like the wreath in the magazine. Not a biblical heroine, just a steady buildup of odds and ends.