Flight Behavior

The driver called out, “Are you her?”

“Preston’s mom,” she replied, while Crystal simultaneously shouted, “Who?”

“Not you. Her. Is she the one that seen the vision.”

“Oh, for crap’s sake,” said Dellarobia. She hoped that hadn’t carried across the road to all those little ears.

“The butterfly lady,” the driver persisted. “Are you the one?”

“I’m Preston Turnbow’s mother. Have you got Preston on there?”

He popped out the door like the prize from a gumball machine, ablaze in his yellow hooded slicker and a smile so wide his face looked stretched.

“You stay right there, baby,” she warned, crossing the road quickly to take his hand and escort him back across.

“Roy!” Preston shouted, running to hug the collie, throwing his arms around the white ruff that ringed Roy’s neck. They all headed for shelter, with Crystal hanging on like a tick. Once they reached the dry porch, Dellarobia set Cordie on her own feet and took the umbrella, shaking off the raindrops.

“I want to see it too,” Preston said.

“See what?”

“The butterfly thing.”

“Not ‘Hi Mommy’ or how was your day. Just, I want to go see the butterflies.”

He looked up at her with such a sorrowful, anxious face, she felt awful. Five and a half years of age, and already he had a worry line between his eyebrows.

“Please?” he said.

She knelt and set down the umbrella so she could put her hands on his shoulders and look him in the eye. “When do you want to go?”

“Now.”

“In the rain?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a long way to walk. A really long way to walk.”

He grinned. “Mama, duh! We can take the ATV.”

“Ah. Your father’s son.”

Crystal had gone into the house with Cordie and already had the letter out of her purse. Dellarobia peeled off every soaked layer down to her bra, and buttoned on her hooded raincoat, kind of going commando just to save time and a clean shirt. It was getting toward dusk already. She found the ATV keys in the pocket of Cub’s red jacket.

“Crystal, let’s make a deal,” she said. “You stay here with Cordie for an hour, and then I’ll look at your letter. My son and I are going to look at butterflies in the rain.”

“I’m not very good at driving this thing,” she warned. In truth she had never driven it out of the shed, but she was getting the hang. It was more like a riding mower than a car, but faster. She kept one arm clamped tightly around Preston in front of her on the seat, and bounced the two of them around a good bit before managing to slow the thing to a creep on the pasture’s bumpy incline.

“It’s bumpy when Daddy drives too,” Preston offered tactfully. Cub had started taking Preston for rides when he was just tiny, and Dellarobia only allowed them to go in little circles around the yard. Cub was pretty cute, a mother hen himself, fussing with the baby carrier strapped to his barrel chest as he inched the vehicle’s fat tires over the ground in fits and starts. It was hard to see the point of taking the child for a ride that went nowhere at zero miles per hour. But he was so proud to have a son.

At the top of the hill she figured out how to take it out of gear and lock the brake before she let Preston jump down and get the gate. She pulled through and he executed the chore of closing the gate with such diligence, all the livestock in the world might have depended on him. She reached inside her raincoat for a dry shirttail to clean Preston’s glasses before they proceeded, and was startled to recall she had no shirt on under there. It was like some stunt she and Dovey used to pull, going out naked under their raincoats for kicks. Now her big thrill was just sparing herself the extra laundry. She fished a crumpled tissue from her raincoat pocket and carefully wiped his lenses, then her own, for their viewing pleasure. Ever since the so-called miracle, she’d been wearing her glasses at all times. To heck with boys and passes, she needed to see where all this was going. The High Road was easier to navigate, to her relief. The tires neatly grabbed its ruts, which had been worn by no vehicle other than this one, come to think of it.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Because it’s kind of chilly. It makes you hungry, when you’re wet and cold. We should go back and feed you if you’re already starving.” Preston was skinny and small for his age, and ran out of fuel easily. Nothing in reserve.

“The ladies feed us lunch at school,” he said solemnly, as if reporting on something with which she might be unacquainted, such as prison conditions.

“Well, honey, I know they do. We send in your envelope. But sometimes when you get home you’re hungry again.” She wondered how soon he would figure out it was a government form, not lunch money, in that envelope. He was one of the free-lunch kids, as Dellarobia herself had been after third grade. A lineage.

Preston made no reply. She hoped he didn’t think that she begrudged him his after-school hunger. Once when she was arguing with Cub about the light bill, they realized Preston was walking from room to room, turning off all the lights.

“It’s no problem,” she told him heartily. “Eating’s good. That’s how you get big. That’s my favorite kind of boy: so hungry he could eat a horse.”

He giggled, finally. It took some doing to cajole Preston into behaving like a regular child. She revved the motor a little. “If we see any horses we’ll grab you a snack,” she said, and he laughed louder.

“I could eat a dog!” he cried. “I could eat Roy!”

“Poor Roy, look out,” she said. Dellarobia felt unexpectedly free, like a person going out on the town, even though she had technically not left the property.

“There goes King Billy,” Preston said.

Her raincoat’s hood was shutting out the upper half of her field of vision. “For real, you saw one already?” She slowed to a crawl before she felt comfortable taking her eyes off the track, leaning forward to peer up into the trees. Sure enough, there was his majesty wobbling through the rain. “You’ve got a good eye. That’s what Mammaw Hester says, King Billy.”

“What do we say?” he asked.

“The same, I guess.” She wondered what tales Hester was telling people when they came up here. Dellarobia wished she knew the real names of things to give her observant son. Teachers used to get exasperated with her, the child with the unending questions, and now here was Preston way out ahead of her. She pushed back her hood, as the rain had mostly subsided. The bare trees dripped, but the sky was starting to lighten up. They neared the fir forest and found the air above the path alive with butterflies.