Flight Behavior

“I can’t go against my dad on that logging,” he said, for the twentieth time.

“You can, but you won’t,” she said. Ditto.

“Because I’m not perfect like you want me to be.” Ditto, ditto. They walked through the glass door and dropped it a few decibels, for decency’s sake. “Show me where else you can get that kind of money from,” Cub hissed, “and I’ll take it to Dad.”

The idea of that mountain dragged down, and a certain world with it, was becoming unthinkable to Dellarobia. Her life was unfolding into something larger by the day, like one of those rectangular gas-station maps that open out to the size of a windshield. She was involved in a way, with those scientists. And strangely, also, with Hester. She craved to tell Cub his mother wanted him to stand up against Bear, but she also longed for Cub to be his own man in this fight. A husband who was not just his mother’s pawn but also the head of his household: was that too much to ask?

A four-foot-tall Santa figure near the store entrance began to grind his hips and emit a thin electronic rendition of “Joy to the World.” It must have had some sensor inside that set the affair in motion when they walked near it. “Okay,” she said, “let’s focus. Christmas ornaments. Did you ask Hester about letting us have some of her stuff?”

“Here’s your Christmas stuff,” Cub said, waving at the aisles. Nobody could argue that one. The store contained enough plastic baubles to cover a hayfield.

“Great,” she said. “Family heirlooms made by slave children in China.” Her mother used to spit that one out like a curse: slave-children-in-China. Dellarobia was startled by the words she’d channeled, and that drab army of orphans she could still see in her mind’s eye. She used to picture them in poorly made caps and jackets, resentful of happy homes everywhere, undercutting her father’s handmade furniture business and her mother’s work as a seamstress. Eventually those brats even shut down the knitwear factory where her mother had stooped from business suits to underwear, in the last decade of her employable life. In hindsight, Dellarobia could fathom her mother’s drinking.

Cub was brewing a bad mood of his own design. He yanked out a shopping cart and began to toss things in: roach and ant killer, Krazy Glue, Clorox, antifreeze, shopping by the same rules he applied to watching TV. Channel-surfing his way through the dollar store. A quest that made her think of the skinny old man they always saw at the landfill, eternally churning the heap with his hoe, seeking some fortune in the dump where fortunes didn’t grow. Some called that living.

“Nice Christmas gifts, honey. If everybody on our list is planning suicide.”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head. A wife was to be endured. Men learned that from television, she thought.

“Well, why do I always have to be the police? You’re over ten dollars already.”

“Oka-ay,” he said, too loudly. “Since you already blew forty on your tar and nicotine.” He trudged off to put the items back, and shortly returned with two T-shirts, Fire Department and Little Pony, in the correct sizes. Six and ten dollars respectively. She took them to consider, rubbing the pathetically thin fabric between her fingers. The side seams of the Little Pony shirt ran right off the edges, already raveling apart.

“Why is girls’ stuff more expensive? Look at this. Half the amount of fabric, half the quality, and almost double the price.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, because boys wear their clothes out faster?”

“Oh, please. You think anybody’s on our side?” She tossed the T-shirts onto a shelf, entirely in the wrong place, and she didn’t care. Let them hire extra help; people needed the jobs. They turned the cart into the seasonal aisle. “Just ask Hester about the ornaments, okay? She’s got dump-truck loads. You could go up in her attic and steal some, she’d never know.” Dellarobia thought of the wooden ornaments her father made years ago, which must still exist somewhere. What a complicated life cycle those must have passed through: attic boxes, funeral upheavals, yard sales. Like an insect going through its stages, all aimed in the end toward flying away.

Cub picked up a brassy-looking plastic bell with the year on it, labeled “Keepsake,” and turned it over. “Two dollars,” he said. “That’s not bad.”

“Here’s the thing, genius, do the math. You need more than one. You need twenty or something, or the tree looks pathetic.”

He put the ornament back. Like a child, she thought. His consumer skills were somewhat more advanced than his daughter’s, but not by much. She looked over the bins of tinselly junk and felt despair, trying to find one single thing that wouldn’t fall apart before you got it home. Maybe her father was lucky to die young with his pride of craftsmanship intact. What would he make of this world? Realistically, it probably wasn’t slave children, but there had to be armies of factory workers making this slapdash stuff, underpaid people cranking out things for underpaid people to buy and use up, living their lives mostly to cancel each other out. A worldwide entrapment of bottom feeders.

“What about all those things you made when you were little, Cub?” she asked. “Those Popsicle-stick stars and stuff she’s kept all this time. Wouldn’t Hester at least give you those for our tree?”

“Talk about tacky,” he said.

“But it’s our tacky. Isn’t that the Christmas deal, pass on the love and all that?”

“The true meaning of Christmas is, Turn it over and look at the price tag.”

This struck her as the most insightful thing Cub had said in years, although maybe he just meant it literally. They began picking through a shelf of shrink-wrapped DVDs labeled “Previously Viewed.” She felt degraded, as if shopping for previously chewed meals. Cub held up one labeled “Monster Machines,” but she shook her head.

“That’s not really what Preston is into now. He likes nature stuff.”

Cub smirked and held up another, showing a gigantic python curled around a frantic girl who was showing a lot of leg.

“Read my lips,” she said, and then mouthed, “Asshole.”

Cub was aware of Preston’s new interest, and she suspected he didn’t care for it. He wanted his son to be good at sports. Preston’s stature, she knew for a fact, was a matter that Cub addressed in his prayers. Heaven forbid he should grow up to be a smart, nearsighted pipsqueak like his mother. There was a TV show Cub liked about geeky young men in an apartment, all geniuses supposedly, always reduced to stammering fools by the hot blond girl next door. Cub laughed and laughed at these boy scientists in their ill-fitting pants and dim social wits. Dellarobia noticed they had a dishwasher, and a pricey-looking leather sofa the size of an Angus steer.