“Rasp. Jerry and Noel.”
“No offense, Dellarobia, but somebody builds you a cozy little box, and you just move in? That’s basically one of the concepts they use in pest control.”
“No offense, Dovey, but you’ve always had a home. Rewinding back to sixteen and getting a do-over wasn’t an option for me. You kind of need parents for that.”
Dellarobia took a long, slow drag on her cigarette, feeling the chemical rush arrive little by little in her blood, her hands and feet, the answer to a longing that seemed larger than her body. “And anyway I’d felt that baby move. It would get the hiccups whenever I tried to lie down. Cub was the happiest he’d ever been in his life. We were going to be this little family. There’s stuff you can’t see from the outside.”
Dovey stood very still, holding her in the eye in the mirror.
“We had to use up our savings to buy it a cemetery plot.”
At that, Dovey sat down beside her and put her head on her shoulder, close to tears, an uncommon and worrisome sight. If they both fell apart at the same time, some greater collapse might follow. “Here’s the thing,” Dellarobia said. “He’d be turning eleven today. If the child had lived, he’d be that old now. We’d be having a fifth-grader birthday party here. I can’t find any possible way to make that real in my head.”
Preston suddenly appeared in the mirror behind them, standing in the doorway, startling Dellarobia so badly she nearly dropped her cigarette.
“Mama,” he said, “smoking gives you cancer and makes you die.”
“Honey, I heard about that too. I ought to quit right now, hadn’t I?”
He nodded soberly. Dellarobia made a show of grinding out her unfinished cigarette in the ashtray. She opened the vanity drawer, pulled out her pack of cigarettes, and flung it into the trash basket. It floated like a shipwreck survivor among the wadded tissues and crumpled receipts. Already Dellarobia was plotting its rescue, her mind darting forward to the next time she’d be able to sneak off for a secret hookup with her most enduring passion, nicotine. Who needed hell when you had a demon like this?
“So,” Dovey said quietly, after Preston had disappeared again, “how many times have you been through that little routine?”
“I hate myself for it.”
“Just don’t picture the crash landing in the cancer ward,” Dovey said, raising one eyebrow. “Like you say, it’s a strategy. Works for some.”
“Okay, fine, I’m a jerk, like the rest of them. Lying to Preston, of all people. The congenital Eagle Scout. He deserves a more honest mother than me.”
“Who do you think is doing any better? You should see what I do at work—the meat counter is guilty-conscience central. People with ‘heart attack’ written all over their faces, buying bacon. Or these hateful old ladies commanding me to get them a twenty-pound Thanksgiving turkey, like that’s going to bring the kids back home this year. The human person cannot face up to a bad outcome, that’s just the deal. We’re all Cleopatra, like that Pam Tillis song. Cruising down that river in Egypt. Queens of de-Nile.”
The word had weight for Dellarobia, who had been through school-sponsored grief groups after each parent’s death. The stillbirth was an unofficial add-on to the second round, in those dim final months of high school she otherwise barely remembered. Denial-anger-bargaining-acceptance, get it over with, was the counselor’s advice. “I’m a lot of things,” she said, “but not in denial, I don’t think.”
“Case rests, sugar.”
Dellarobia felt disoriented, with all those years inside her that added up to naught. Twenty-eight. She felt so young, especially with Dovey here anchoring her to the girl she’d been at seventeen, and at seven. She and Dovey could make each other over until their hair fell out, but nothing in the core of a person really altered.
“I look like a preteen runaway,” Dovey pronounced, startling Dellarobia with her similar frame of mind. But that wasn’t it. Dovey’s focus was on the flat, flyaway hair. “Who were the little orphan girls in those books we read?”
“The boxcar children.”
“Them! I’m a boxcar child.”
“You always say that, and you’re wrong. You turn out looking like Posh Spice, and I wind up like Scary. Why do we keep doing this?”
“Repetition of the same behavior, expecting different results: that’s actually one definition of mental illness.” Dovey read a lot of magazines.
“I look like Little Orphan Annie.” Dellarobia stood up and shook her curls. Maybe she could get a Flashdance thing going, in the off-the-shoulder T-shirt. But there was no question about which of them was the real orphan. Dovey rolled her dark silk floss around like a shampoo commercial, relishing her own existence in any form.
“Or some kind of hooker,” Dellarobia persisted, fussing with the curly tendrils around her face. “You have to admit, I look like I have more hair than brains.”
“But here’s the thing, peach. You don’t.”
Dellarobia shot her a look. “ ‘Peach.’ Where’d that come from?”
Dovey laughed. “This guy that comes into Cash Club calls me that. He’s tried to hit on me more times than he’s bought ground beef. Cute as the devil, b-t-w.”
“How long’s this been going on?”
“I don’t know, a year? I’m just using him as ammo against the guys I work with. They’re always drooling over the ladies that come to the meat counter.” She deepened her voice and grunted: “ ‘Hey, I see my future ex-wife out there.’ ”
Dellarobia did not laugh.
Dovey shrugged. “So this guy’s drool bait. My future ex.”
“And jailbait, more or less. Am I right, he’s real young?”
“Of course,” Dovey said.
“A dimple in his chin, right here? Works out, really good pecs and shoulders? A silver gauge in his left ear?”
They read each other’s faces in the mirror. “You are totally—”
“I’m not.”
“Him?”
“Him.”
“I swear to God, I’m going to take a couple of hams out of that jackass. I mean it. I’ve got the knives to do it.”
“No, Dovey, let him be. He’s nothing to me anymore.”