“Do you ever think what will happen when all this goes away?” she asked Hester.
“You mean the people or the butterflies or what?”
Dellarobia wasn’t sure what she’d meant, beyond the impossible idea of returning to her previous self. The person who’d lit out one day to shed an existence that felt about the size of one of those plastic eggs that pantyhose came in. From that day on, week by week, the size of her life had doubled out. The question was how to refold all that back into one package, size zero. “The butterflies might die,” she said finally. “That’s out of our hands. But maybe they wouldn’t. I’m saying, what if?”
It struck her now that probably it would happen, the folding back in. She was no longer world-famous or a national event. As of late, she wasn’t even all that town-famous. People forgot so quickly, or moved on. Her influence, if any, was now limited to the family domain. Her marriage. That was about the size of it. She could easily end up back where all this started, launching her heart on some risky solo flight after a man.
“Is Bear going back to those logging men, at the end of March?” she asked.
“That’s about to get settled,” Hester said.
“How do you mean?”
“We’re having a prayer meeting on it. With Pastor Ogle, after the service.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No. Tomorrow is dinner on the ground. Sunday next.”
Dinner on the ground meant a potluck meal after church, not necessarily on blankets outdoors if the weather was bad. The fellowship hall had tables. “Who’s we?”
“Anybody in the family that wants to come. You and Cub come on.”
“Bear’s agreed to this?”
Hester didn’t answer directly. “Our place has been raised up by this,” she said.
“You could do a lot, if they came back. You know Lupe, that keeps my kids?”
No answer came. Rattle, rattle, went the cartons in Dellarobia’s bag. Hester knew very well who Lupe was. Dellarobia persisted. “She and her husband used to do this kind of business in Mexico. They say it’s better to keep people back from the roost site and take them up on horses. Make a little program for people, and they’ll behave.”
Hester seemed to take this in. “That’d be something to ask Rick Baker at the insurance. Horses. I expect he’d say no to that.”
“Well, you’d have to get some kind of a rider. You would charge an admission. There could be enough in it to hire some people. There’s even a thing where you can get money to leave your woods standing.”
“Says who?”
Dellarobia didn’t answer that. Who else? “It’s some business deal. Companies wanting to junk up the air will pay you to keep standing trees, to clean it back out.”
“Pie in the sky,” Hester said. “Sounds like.”
“Well, it is that,” Dellarobia said, smiling. She liked bowling over Hester. “It pertains to the sky.”
They were stopped by a fallen tree that lay at a slant across the trail. Hester left Dellarobia on the trail and walked twenty paces to the tree’s lower end and sat down on it, facing back the way they’d come. “I’ve got to take a breather,” Hester said, holding up her pack of Camel Lights like a flash card. “You quit, didn’t you?”
“Lead us not into temptation,” Dellarobia said, covering her eyes.
Hester lit up and blew smoke at the sky. “I knew you would.”
“Would quit? How do you figure? I didn’t know I would.”
“That’s just you. You make up your mind on something, and it’s done.” A little wind scuttled across the forest floor and rattled the beige leaves that clung to the slim trees all around them. Hester added, “Not like some in your house. That has about one idea in a year, and gets so worn out from it he has to go lie down.”
Dellarobia almost smiled, but didn’t. The man had no defenders. “Why do you always treat Cub that way?”
“Like what?”
“Like a child.”
“Because he’s my child. Why do you?”
The downed trunk angled across the trail at chest height to Dellarobia. She folded her arms and leaned in, as if bellying up to some rodeo. Hester was out of her line of sight, off to the left in her own little cloud. “Cub has his good points,” she told Hester. “But a wife sees a man for what he is. You’re the mother, that’s different. You’re supposed to be blind to his faults.”
“Can you not see your kids for what they are?”
She considered this. Cordelia was reckless, cheerful, physically striking in a way that would get noticed, self-centered in a way that might persist. Preston was thrillingly quick to understand facts, a little dweeby about people. In time he might grow secretive. “I can,” she conceded. “They’re human. I know that. But I’d lay down my life for my kids, Hester. I would.”
“So you would,” she said. “So I would.”
How dare she, Dellarobia thought. Pretending she’d die for anyone. She would probably light a fire with her own kin if she got too cold. Certainly she had no use for her grandchildren.
Hester spoke again from her little grove of trees. “A child doesn’t have to walk on water for you. But a husband does.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Children are born so small. But yet you love them that way, all dumb and helpless, so you keep on. With a husband you don’t get that chance. Him you’ve got to look up to.”
“I’m five-foot-nothing, Hester. I look up to everybody.”
“No, you don’t. Not Cub. You never did.”
Dellarobia felt socked. The vision that ambushed her was of Crystal in the dollar store that day. How she’d looked, talking to Cub. Craving, yes, but also admiring, cherishing. By any measure, looking up. How much more of a man Cub would be if he’d married some sweet, average-minded girl who thought Cub Turnbow hung the moon. Dellarobia felt loss as wide as a river. For what she’d taken from him.
“You two were no match,” Hester said. “I told Bear that from day one. You wait, I told him. That smart gal will not stick around.”
“But I did!” Dellarobia marched through the thicket of little trees to face down Hester where she sat. “Am I not standing here?”