“Where’d that newspaper come from?” she snapped, hearing from herself the same voice she’d used earlier today when she caught Cordie with pennies in her mouth.
Cub didn’t look up. “Mom’s.”
So she couldn’t subscribe to the paper, but he could read his mother’s. “For goodness’ sakes, you could change your shirt, if you’re not going to take a shower.”
“I done a full day’s shift for once, honey. We ought to be praising the Lord.”
“Thank you, Jesus, and you smell like it,” she said under her breath, actually hating how she felt. She was no better than Hester, treating him like this. She could hardly blame him for reacting to the circumstances she’d just thrown in his face, telling him about the morning’s strange encounter and invitation. He’d taken it all in benignly, seeming puzzled but not suspicious, as some men would be if their wives struck up relationships with passing strangers. She’d told Cub this man was older, and that he was black, possibly even a foreigner, thinking this might head off embarrassing surprises. Maybe Cub believed those traits took a man out of the running in some way, so that jealousy wasn’t an issue. Should it have been? Dellarobia wanted to weep, for her nervousness. She wished she had seen that movie Dovey told her about. Maybe she’d know how to act. She started to ask Cub to set the table, but thought better of it. At least she could organize things such that Mr. Byron would not get the SpongeBob glass.
If Mr. Byron showed up at all. That question was also starting to rack her nerves, as the man had seemingly vanished. She’d kept an eye out the back window all morning but never did see him come back down through the pasture. She had thought he would stop back in just to say whatever he would say—“Thanks, great butterflies, see you later.” By midafternoon she figured he had come and gone, but when she checked out front, the VW still sat there with the big curved smile on its rear end, orange as ever. Something must have happened to him. She could imagine the possibilities: he’d lost the trail, he’d fallen, broken an ankle. He wasn’t a country person, anyone could see that.
She towel-dried the macaroni pot and kneeled to put it away, dodging Cordie, who staggered into the kitchen with the green baby blanket over her head. Cub leaned over to scoop her up and squash the happy, squealing bundle of her onto his lap.
“What’s in this old bunch of rags?” he asked, jostling her from side to side, eliciting peals of giggles. Half the time Cub didn’t seem to recall he’d fathered children, and then there was this, the fact of the matter. They were the apple of his eye. “Honey, have you seen the baby anywhere?” he asked.
“Not for weeks and weeks,” Dellarobia replied.
“Do you reckon we ought to throw these old rags in the garbage?” He lifted the green fuzzy bundle over his head, invoking loud hysteria that a stranger might take for anguish, but Dellarobia knew better. Cordie loved disappearing. Which was funny, because not that long ago, Preston could throw that blanket over a toy she was crawling after and Cordie would sit up and howl with despair at its sudden disappearance. She didn’t know to look under the blanket, and Preston couldn’t resist repeating the experiment, amazed at his sister’s conviction that unseen things did not exist. Some time between then and now, Cordie had conquered the biggest truth in the world.
“I ought to go on and feed the kids,” Dellarobia said. “I mean, look, it’s getting dark. What could a person do outside on a mountain all day?”
Cub set his daughter’s bare feet on the linoleum, and off she flew to the living room. “Whatever it was,” he said, “I’m sure we’ll hear all about it.”
“You don’t sound thrilled.”
“Since when do we grab people off the street into our home to feed them supper?”
Well, here it comes after all, she thought. Leave it to Cub to take a full sixty minutes to realize he was mad. “I guess since we decided to behave like Christians,” she said. “Why, what were you planning for tonight, to watch ADHD TV like always?”
Cub loudly exhaled his disgust and went back to his sports page. It wasn’t kind, the attention-deficit remark. Cub had barely followed the thread of high school. But it drove her nuts the way he thumbed the remote and trolled the channels from News to Spike to Comedy to Shopping. What was the use of so many channels? So often, some crazy thing would pique her on the fly-by: a woman swimming alone across an ocean, or a blind couple taking in a multitude of foundling babies. But she would have to snatch the clicker from Cub and sit on it, if she wanted enough time to connect the dots.
She was dying for a smoke, but didn’t want to hear what she’d hear from Cub if she stepped out on the porch right now. Instead she checked the oven and yelled for the kids, thinking it best to go ahead and put Cordie in the high chair while she finished setting the table. Preston came obediently when called, shepherding Cordelia into the kitchen and struggling to pick her up, as if he might be able to lift her into the high chair. His desire to be helpful was boundless. Just like Roy and Charlie, she thought. My son has the personality of a border collie. She moved quickly to take Cordie.
“Honey, you can’t pick up your sister. She weighs half as much as you do.”
“You could get a hernia,” Cub offered from behind the newspaper.
She had hoped to feed the kids much earlier and put them in front of the TV while the guest was here. Mr. Byron might not be accustomed to the hullaballoo of the toddler dining experience. But Preston had caught wind of the plan and would have none of it, even when she tried coaxing him with dessert, a no-bake gelatin and cookie thing the kids loved. Preston was no dessert-first man, and he wasn’t easy to bribe. If a mysterious stranger had come to town, he was calling dibs.
“I’ll be the lookout,” he declared now, glancing from the back door to the front, then to his mother. “Which way will he come?”
“I don’t know, I guess he’s still up the mountain. Cub, do you think we should send out a search party? He’s been up there since eight o’clock this morning.”
“Lucky for him it’s not raining pitchforks,” Cub said tersely.
“Not at the moment, for a blessed change,” she agreed. Cub folded his newspaper but made no other concession to her sense of this occasion, which would be a disaster if he planned to sulk. She needed his cooperation. “He’s a visitor in our town,” she said quietly, “not just some homeless person off the road. And anyway, what if he was? Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. That’s the Bible.”