Pigs in Heaven

“He didn’t run off with them, either.” Angie crosses her arms and doesn’t sit.

“I want to hear about the mules that kidnapped him in Mexico.” Taylor looks uneasily at Lucky, after she’s said this, but he is beaming. This is his element. The window illumin-ates his face, raising the color of his eyes to a gas-flame blue.

“Oh, honey, that was unbelievable,” Angie says. “They told him they was going to shoot him.” Taylor tries to imagine stubborn four-legged animals with guns, until Angie explains that mules are men who have something to do with drug running. “If you’re anywheres near Mexico and someone shoots you for no apparent reason,” she says knowledgeably,

“they’re a mule.”

Taylor is relieved to be home in one piece. She and Jax sit up in bed with his tape of They Might Be Giants turned down low, so they’ll hear when Turtle has fallen asleep in the next room. Turtle talks herself to sleep nearly every night in a quiet language no one can understand. Over the years, Taylor and Alice have had many long-distance phone calls about motherhood. Alice told her not to worry when Turtle was three and still didn’t talk, or later, when she did talk but would say only the names of vegetables in long, strange lists.

Alice still says there’s nothing to worry about, and she has always been right before. She says Turtle is talking over the day with her personal angels.

They hear Turtle sigh and begin to hum a low, tedious song. Then they hear the clunk of her comfort object, a flashlight she calls Mary, which she has slept with since the day she found it years ago in Taylor’s employer’s truck.

“I missed you,” Taylor tells Jax. “Compared to what I’ve been through lately, you seem normal.”

He kisses her hair, which smells like a thunderstorm, and her shoulder, which smells like beach rocks. He tells her,

“Sex will get you through times with no money better than money will get you through times with no sex.”

“The thing I really missed was your jokes.”

“I missed your cognitive skills,” he says. “And your syntax.

Honestly, that’s all. Not your body. I despise your body.”

He drawls on purpose, sounding more southern than he needs to, though he can’t match the hard-soft angular music of her Kentucky hills.

“Well, that’s sure a load off my mind,” she says, laughing, shuddering her dark hair off her shoulders without self-consciousness. She’s the first woman he’s ever known who doesn’t give a damn how she looks, or is completely happy with the way she looks, which amounts to the same thing.

Usually women are aware of complex formulas regarding how long the legs should be in relation to the waist in relation to the eyelashes—a mathematics indecipherable to men but strangely crucial to women. Taylor apparently never took the class. He wishes he could have been there when she was born, to watch the whole process of Taylor. He lies across the bed with his head in her lap, but when he realizes she’s looking at his profile, turns his face away. Although he rarely sees it himself, he knows his profile is unusual and even startles people: there’s no indentation at all between his forehead and the bridge of his nose. Taylor says he looks like an Egyptian Pharaoh, which is exactly what she would say, with no apologies for never having seen any actual Egyptian art. Taylor behaves as if what she believes, and what she is, should be enough for anyone.

She’s not the first woman on earth to insist on his good looks; that’s not why he is in love with her. Jax has broad shoulders and hands that apparently suggest possibilities.

He’s proud that he can reach an octave and a half on a piano like Franz Liszt; his one gift is largeness. When his band performs, women tend to give him articles of their clothing with telephone numbers inked on the elastic.

“You think she’s asleep?”

Taylor shakes her head. “Not yet. She’s having trouble relaxing. I learned a lot about her breathing on this trip.”

“You’re picking up certain character traits from your friend Lou Ann.”

Lou Ann Ruiz, who is like a second mother to Turtle, tends toward an obsession with health and safety. But to her credit, Jax allows, Lou Ann is making bold changes in her life: she recently got a job at an exercise salon called Fat Chance and now wears Lycra outfits in color combinations that seem dangerous, like the poisonous frogs that inhabit the Amazon.

“Is now a good time to tell you about the phone calls?”

“What phone calls?” Taylor asks, through a heartfelt yawn.

“The approximately four thousand calls that have come in since you achieved national prominence on Monday.”