Flight Behavior (36 page)

Dovey nodded slowly, stroking the face of her phone. “There are.” After a minute she put it away. “What else are you not telling me?”

“Find some more orange sweaters, and I’ll tell you.” Together they combed the bin and fished out nine altogether, in various shades of hideous. The knitter-women had hit on a jackpot scheme. Nobody really wanted to keep their orange sweaters anyway.

Dellarobia wasn’t hiding anything. She’d only gotten the story on the knitters this week when the boxes arrived. The rest was all science, monitoring and sampling, nothing Dovey wanted to hear. “Hester thinks God is keeping the winter mild to protect the butterflies,” she said. “There’s a faction at church that thinks that too. The butterflies knew God was looking after things here, and that’s why they came to Feathertown.”

“Your mother-in-law is a hot mess,” Dovey said.

Dellarobia could not dispute the diagnosis. “I’m actually kind of worried about her. It’s a trap, you know? If she’s got God in charge of all this, and then something bad happens to us, she’ll have to admit God knew what He was doing. Mainly it’s a big fat incentive to ignore bad news.” Such as global warming, a subject whose very mention now made Cub angry, as if there were some betrayal involved.

Dovey picked up an umbrella with mouse ears that had fallen into the aisle. “I saw where somebody’s putting up money to move the whole kit and caboodle.”

“Move what, the butterflies?” This was news to Dellarobia.

“Yep,” Dovey said. “To Florida or something. They would capture them some way and move them. This guy owns a trailer rig.”

“Wow. I never even thought about that. Where’d you hear this?”

“Topix,” Dovey replied. “It’s this site where people can post local news. It mostly ends up being trash talk, though.”

“Oh, well, I bet there’s plenty about me on there.” She checked out an eight-dollar bike, too big for Preston now but perfect for next Christmas. But where could she hide it? Where would they all be in a year’s time? The consideration made her feel a little light-headed, almost the same swoony feeling she’d had that day sitting on the log, when Ovid mentioned her children’s adulthood. Why should it feel so risky to count concretely on a future?

“So is there?” she pressed. “Gossip about me?”

Dovey waggled her head from side to side. “Don’t be so sure you’re the center of the universe. Why is Hester so wrapped up in the whole butterfly thing?”

“I don’t know. She and Bear are butting heads. I guess Hester sees the monarchs as . . .” Dellarobia couldn’t finish the sentence. Maybe some form of redemption for a family she saw as having gone to the dogs: lazy son, troublemaking daughter-in-law, inexplicably uninteresting grandkids, a husband sitting out church in Men’s Fellowship pretending it’s a honky-tonk, minus the beer. Certainly Hester wasn’t jumping on the financial opportunity. She’d nailed a coffee can to the pasture gatepost with a sign suggesting a five-dollar entry fee, which the sightseers managed to overlook. No one in the family had time to monitor the onslaught of visitors. The tree huggers, as Cub called them.

Dovey laughed aloud, and Dellarobia turned to see the kids marching toward her toting suitcases from a matched set, both the same red plaid. Preston had the medium-size, Cordie the little overnight bag. Their smiles matched too, both oversize.

“Thinking of going somewhere?” she asked.

“Africa,” announced Preston.

“Affica!” screamed his sister.

“Okay. Watch out for lions.”

They giggled and ran to catch their plane. Africa, the unimaginable place where migrating birds went, while people thought they were burrowing into the riverbank.

“There’s probably a Mama-bear suitcase with that set,” Dovey suggested.

“Wouldn’t that be something, just to blow out of town,” Dellarobia said, feeling heavy. Dovey had avoided her question. “It’s probably the same stuff I hear at church. The gossip you’re seeing on Facebook or whatever. That I’m getting above my station.”

“They’re jealous,” Dovey conceded. “That is the long and short of it.”

“What do I have, that anybody wants? Dovey, look,
me
. Competing with homeless dudes for bargains on used bedding. Jealous of what?”

Dovey shrugged. “You’re world-famous.”

“And that has gotten me what? Money? Any say over anything?”

“You got a job,” Dovey offered.

She wheeled on her friend. “Is that the story? That I got the job because I’m some kind of Internet soft-porn queen? I had nothing to do with that picture. Do people think I just slept my way up?”

“Whoa, nellie. Defensive much?” Dovey said. “And b-t-dubs, you’re still wearing that blazer you put on half an hour ago. You might not want a shoplifting charge on your wall of fame.”

Dellarobia took off the blazer and threw it into a wooden bin full of inflated balls. “You
know
why I have that job. I invited a stranger to supper, like a decent person. That is the one and only reason Ovid Byron is friends with us.”

“I remember,” Dovey said, uneasily. “I hear you.”

“You were impressed. That’s what you said on the phone that day.” There had been some jokes about a Tennessee temptress, but it wasn’t like that. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

They turned down an aisle of uniforms and scrubs, arranged by color: pink, green, yellow, birthday party colors. To be worn by medical personnel while attending the mortally injured. “Why does everybody want to be famous,” Dellarobia asked, “and at the same time they want to hear the ugliest trash about famous people?”

“I guess they hate what they haven’t got.”

“Everybody wants to be rich, too, but there’s still some kind of team spirit. You should hear Bear on his rant against raising taxes on the millionaires. He says they worked for every penny, and that’s what he went in the military to protect.”

“Wow. He was a gunner in ’Nam to protect CEO salaries?”

“I guess.”

“Well, yeah,” Dovey said. “That’s America. We watch shows about rich people’s houses and their designer dresses and we drool. It’s patriotic.”

“Not me. I think I hate rich people.”

“Yeah, but you’re an equal-opportunity hard-ass. You hate everybody.”

“I do not,” Dellarobia exclaimed, surprised. “Am I that bad?”

Dovey reconsidered. “
Hate
is a strong word. You don’t let people get away with much. Except me. Somehow I got a lifetime pass.”

“I keep thinking if I go to church I’ll learn to be sweet. Bobby Ogle is so good. And Cub is sweet. My kids are, basically. So what’s my problem?”

“Diabolical possession,” Dovey suggested. “Just a hunch.”

Dellarobia picked up a bathroom set, soap dish and toothbrush holder, brand-new, still in the box. Two dollars. It probably started life in the dollar store, for sixteen. Why didn’t everyone just come straight here? “Seriously,” she said, “is it hateful if you don’t agree with your home team about every single thing? Because I can agree on maybe nine out of ten. But then I start to wander out of the box on one subject, like this environment thing, and
man
. You’d think I was flipping everybody the bird.”

“Now, see, that’s why everybody wants Internet friends. You can find people just exactly like you. Screw your neighbors and your family, too messy.” Dovey’s phone buzzed, and she laughed, ignoring it. “The trouble is, once you filter out everybody that doesn’t agree with you, all that’s left is maybe this one retired surfer guy living in Idaho.”

The entire back wall of the warehouse was packed with books, in shelves that went all the way to the ceiling where no one could possibly get at them. A pear-shaped man with half-glasses and dyed black hair in a ponytail stood in the aisle reading a hefty hardback. Preston had found the children’s books. He shot his mother a pleading look.

“One Book, One Buck,” she read aloud from the sign. “We can take home a couple, but looking’s free.” Preston began pulling books off the shelf like a manic consumer in some sort of stopwatch-driven shopping spree. He and Cordie made a fortress of books and happily dug in.

“My, my,” Dovey said. “You’ve got yourself a couple of little bookworms.”

Little smarties, Dellarobia thought. “I hate that the library closed.”

Dovey gave her an odd look. “The one in Cleary is open. Not that I’ve ever darkened the door. But people say it’s good. I guess with the college here.”

Dellarobia wondered why Cleary had felt off-limits all these years. Enemy territory, as Cub and her in-laws would have it. The presence of the college made them prickly, as if the whole town were given over to the mischief of the privileged. In the 1990s there was supposedly an event where some boys got drunk and rode horses naked on Main Street. And the football rivalry, of course. Cleary High unfailingly beat Feathertown at homecoming. These complaints made her feel foolish and exposed, as if she’d been playing house in a structure whose walls had all blown away.

“Do you know what?” Dovey asked abruptly. “I’ve had it with Facebook. We should invent Buttbook. It’s more honest. You’d have Buttbook Enemies. You would Butt people to inform them you did not wish to be their friends.”

“You could do worse,” Dellarobia proposed. “You could Poop them.”

At the end of the books was a display of luggage large and small, solid and plaid. This is where the kids had found the suitcases, and had put them back, too, nestled against a Mama-bear version, just as Dovey supposed. Most of them looked new. Dellarobia felt bleary again, looking at this unused luggage: the golden anniversary cruise that detoured into the ICU, the honeymoon called off for financial reasons. Every object in this place gave off the howl of someone’s canceled hopes.

Dovey seemed deaf to the chorus. “Remember when we were going to be airline stewardesses?” she asked. “But they don’t actually go anywhere, do they? Fly around all day and end up in the same place, bringing snacks to grumpy people, who needs it?”

Dellarobia thought that sounded exactly like her life.

Preston came galloping toward them with a book, breathless. He opened it to a particular page and asked what it said. “Where’s your sister?” Dellarobia asked.

“Don’t worry, she’s with our books,” he replied.

“You can’t just leave her.” She looked up the way to make sure she could still see Cordie. The place was teeming with unattended children. Preston’s book was an encyclopedia of animals. The objects of his curiosity were a Mollymawk and a Goony Bird, Denizens of the Lonely Seas. Preston accepted this information as if he’d suspected it all along, and turned to another page. “Tasmanian Devil,” she read. “He mates in March and April.” The book had a quaint look about it. She paged back to a section titled: Why Nature Is Important to Your Child. “Herbert Hoover was an outstanding geologist,” she read aloud. “How come scientists don’t run for president anymore?”

“Can I have it,
please
?” Preston begged.

“It’s kind of old-timey,” Dellarobia warned. She looked for a date: 1952.

“But it’s
animals
,” Preston argued. “They stay the same!”

“The price is right,” Dovey advised.

“Okay, it’s yours.” Dellarobia wished her son could aspire to more than a bargain-basement science book. Obviously, that’s why most people didn’t shop here. They didn’t want to think of themselves as people who shopped here. But Preston looked thrilled as he ran off to rescue his sister. Down at the end of the books, the pear-shaped man was still reading, halfway through that big book with intent to finish. Maybe he came here daily.

She and Dovey pushed down an aisle of pet items. Birdcages hunkered like skeletons alongside quiescent hamster wheels. Old, crusty aquariums lined a shelf, bricks of emptiness in a wall. The ghosts of all these dead creatures in their former homes made her think of the invisible baby that built her own house. The baby she and Cub had never discussed. That Preston and Cordie might never know about.

“I hate this,” she said to Dovey. “Pet cemetery.”

“Oh, no,” Dovey said. “Those pets just grew up and went away to college.”

“So how come we didn’t do that?”

They came to a halt by a wig stand, wigless: a white Styrofoam bulb the size of a head, notable only for the face drawn on it with colored markers. The portrait was inexpert but extremely detailed, down to the eyelashes and lip liner and well-placed freckles, obviously the handiwork of a young girl. One who had needed a wig. Dellarobia said the word people never wanted to hear: “Cancer.”

She and Dovey stood in silent company with the young artist who no longer needed the wig. For better or for worse. Nothing stays the same, life is defined by a state of flux; that was basic biology. Or so Dellarobia had been told, perhaps too late for it really to sink in. She was an ordinary person. Loss was the enemy.

A gentle tap on her forearm made her jump. “Jeez, Preston!” She put her hand on her chest. “You snuck up on me.”

He looked up at her through his smudged glasses, penitent, hopeful, sure of his next move. All things Preston. He held up the same book, this time open to a horrific close-up. “Magnified face of the common housefly,” she read aloud.

“Cool!” Preston paged ahead. “What are these?”

“Ants,” she read. “Flying.”

“Ants fly?” Dovey and Preston asked at the same time.

“The Marriage Flight,” she read aloud, and skimmed ahead to summarize. “At certain times of the year the nest has winged individuals, both males and perfect females.” She glanced at Preston. “That’s a quote,” she told him, “perfect females. For some unknown reason, one day all the other ants will turn on the winged ones, attacking them mercilessly and driving them out of the colony. They test out their wings for the first time on the so-called marriage flight.” She looked up at Preston again. “It’s an old book. I think nowadays they’d say mating.”

He nodded gravely.

“After mating, the female tears off her wings and crawls in a hole to start her own colony. After rearing a small nucleus of workers, she becomes an egg-laying machine.”

Dovey shuddered. “Sheesh. And they all live happily ever after.”