Dear Abby had a smart mouth and a kind heart, that's why people read her; the combination was rare. And rarer still, perfect grammar. Dellarobia used to read Abby faithfully, along with the police blotter and national news roundup, until Cub insisted they couldn't afford to renew their subscription to the Cleary Courier. She and Cub fought about it. Why pay for the news when you can see it on TV? was his argument. He would never stop channel-surfing long enough for her to get the end of the story, that was hers.
"You know what, Crystal? You go ahead and write your letter, but I think I'll just steer clear. I mean, holy cow, Brenda's mom. You do not want to meet that lady in a dark alley."
"I'm scared for my life, I kid you not," Crystal agreed. "And just so you know, before you look at my letter? I changed some things."
"Changed some of the facts, you're saying."
"No, just small things. Like I didn't mention the drinking, because that's nobody's business now. Clean and sober means starting over. And plus, I said, 'My husband and I,' instead of I'm a single mother."
Dellarobia wondered if this bus would arrive before Christmas. Cordie was writhing like an inchworm, wanting down, but they were too close to the road. And the rain was running in sheets across the asphalt. The ditch had become a creek, leaf-filled and rising. Her tennis shoes were goners. "Let me get this straight. You're fibbing to Dear Abby to get her on your side. And this will help your situation how?"
"Listen, you have no idea how people are. You're married."
"I thought I was suddenly the talk of the town."
"But married, okay? I just don't think Abby would give me a fair hearing if she knew my kids were illegitimate. I also told her I've accepted Christ as my personal savior."
"I don't think Abby cares that much. To tell you the truth, I think I saw somewhere she's Jewish."
"You are shitting me!"
At last the bus crested the hill, moving toward them like a golden cruise ship in its broad, square majesty. Dellarobia wanted to jump and wave for joy, rescued from her desert island. The usual parade of impatient drivers followed behind the bus, no doubt cursing their luck at getting trapped in slow-motion hell, stopping every hundred feet or so, with no hope of passing on this curvy road. Dellarobia thought of all the swear words she'd hurled from that position herself, and now as a newly minted mother-of-bus-rider she apologized from her heart to bus drivers everywhere. She wasn't sure if she'd need to flag it down, and was relieved when the amber lights began blinking from side to side. The stop sign swung out like a proud red wing. She waved to the driver, hoping to gain points with this woman who'd been charged with Preston's safety. But she was tugging at the bus window, one of those sliding affairs. It finally came down with a snap.
The driver called out, "Are you her?"
"Preston's mom," she replied, while Crystal simultaneously shouted, "Who?"
"Not you. Her. Is she the one that seen the vision."
"Oh, for crap's sake," said Dellarobia. She hoped that hadn't carried across the road to all those little ears.
"The butterfly lady," the driver persisted. "Are you the one?"
"I'm Preston Turnbow's mother. Have you got Preston on there?"
He popped out the door like the prize from a gumball machine, ablaze in his yellow hooded slicker and a smile so wide his face looked stretched.
"You stay right there, baby," she warned, crossing the road quickly to take his hand and escort him back across.
"Roy!" Preston shouted, running to hug the collie, throwing his arms around the white ruff that ringed Roy's neck. They all headed for shelter, with Crystal hanging on like a tick. Once they reached the dry porch, Dellarobia set Cordie on her own feet and took the umbrella, shaking off the raindrops.
"I want to see it too," Preston said.
"See what?"
"The butterfly thing."
"Not 'Hi Mommy' or how was your day. Just, I want to go see the butterflies."
He looked up at her with such a sorrowful, anxious face, she felt awful. Five and a half years of age, and already he had a worry line between his eyebrows.
"Please?" he said.
She knelt and set down the umbrella so she could put her hands on his shoulders and look him in the eye. "When do you want to go?"
"Now."
"In the rain?"
"Yes."
"It's a long way to walk. A really long way to walk."
He grinned. "Mama, duh! We can take the ATV."
"Ah. Your father's son."
Crystal had gone into the house with Cordie and already had the letter out of her purse. Dellarobia peeled off every soaked layer down to her bra, and buttoned on her hooded raincoat, kind of going commando just to save time and a clean shirt. It was getting toward dusk already. She found the ATV keys in the pocket of Cub's red jacket.
"Crystal, let's make a deal," she said. "You stay here with Cordie for an hour, and then I'll look at your letter. My son and I are going to look at butterflies in the rain."
"I'm not very good at driving this thing," she warned. In truth she had never driven it out of the shed, but she was getting the hang. It was more like a riding mower than a car, but faster. She kept one arm clamped tightly around Preston in front of her on the seat, and bounced the two of them around a good bit before managing to slow the thing to a creep on the pasture's bumpy incline.
"It's bumpy when Daddy drives too," Preston offered tactfully. Cub had started taking Preston for rides when he was just tiny, and Dellarobia only allowed them to go in little circles around the yard. Cub was pretty cute, a mother hen himself, fussing with the baby carrier strapped to his barrel chest as he inched the vehicle's fat tires over the ground in fits and starts. It was hard to see the point of taking the child for a ride that went nowhere at zero miles per hour. But he was so proud to have a son.
At the top of the hill she figured out how to take it out of gear and lock the brake before she let Preston jump down and get the gate. She pulled through and he executed the chore of closing the gate with such diligence, all the livestock in the world might have depended on him. She reached inside her raincoat for a dry shirttail to clean Preston's glasses before they proceeded, and was startled to recall she had no shirt on under there. It was like some stunt she and Dovey used to pull, going out naked under their raincoats for kicks. Now her big thrill was just sparing herself the extra laundry. She fished a crumpled tissue from her raincoat pocket and carefully wiped his lenses, then her own, for their viewing pleasure. Ever since the so-called miracle, she'd been wearing her glasses at all times. To heck with boys and passes, she needed to see where all this was going. The High Road was easier to navigate, to her relief. The tires neatly grabbed its ruts, which had been worn by no vehicle other than this one, come to think of it.
"Are you hungry?" she asked. "Because it's kind of chilly. It makes you hungry, when you're wet and cold. We should go back and feed you if you're already starving." Preston was skinny and small for his age, and ran out of fuel easily. Nothing in reserve.
"The ladies feed us lunch at school," he said solemnly, as if reporting on something with which she might be unacquainted, such as prison conditions.
"Well, honey, I know they do. We send in your envelope. But sometimes when you get home you're hungry again." She wondered how soon he would figure out it was a government form, not lunch money, in that envelope. He was one of the free-lunch kids, as Dellarobia herself had been after third grade. A lineage.
Preston made no reply. She hoped he didn't think that she begrudged him his after-school hunger. Once when she was arguing with Cub about the light bill, they realized Preston was walking from room to room, turning off all the lights.
"It's no problem," she told him heartily. "Eating's good. That's how you get big. That's my favorite kind of boy: so hungry he could eat a horse."
He giggled, finally. It took some doing to cajole Preston into behaving like a regular child. She revved the motor a little. "If we see any horses we'l
l grab you a snack," she said, and he laughed louder.
"I could eat a dog!" he cried. "I could eat Roy!"
"Poor Roy, look out," she said. Dellarobia felt unexpectedly free, like a person going out on the town, even though she had technically not left the property.
"There goes King Billy," Preston said.
Her raincoat's hood was shutting out the upper half of her field of vision. "For real, you saw one already?" She slowed to a crawl before she felt comfortable taking her eyes off the track, leaning forward to peer up into the trees. Sure enough, there was his majesty wobbling through the rain. "You've got a good eye. That's what Mammaw Hester says, King Billy."
"What do we say?" he asked.
"The same, I guess." She wondered what tales Hester was telling people when they came up here. Dellarobia wished she knew the real names of things to give her observant son. Teachers used to get exasperated with her, the child with the unending questions, and now here was Preston way out ahead of her. She pushed back her hood, as the rain had mostly subsided. The bare trees dripped, but the sky was starting to lighten up. They neared the fir forest and found the air above the path alive with butterflies.
"Let's get off and walk from here," she said, relieved to cut the noisy engine and go on foot. She wanted to watch his upturned face. Despite the wet hair stuck to his forehead and raindrops stippling his wire-framed glasses, Preston was in heaven. "There-goes-King-Billy, there-goes-King-Billy!" he cried again and again, rolling the sentence out in the rapid-fire manner he used for yelling "Five-four-three-two-one-blastoff!" prior to launching flying objects. Soon there were too many kings for each one to get his own announcement, but Preston's mouth still moved silently.
Today there were not so many flying around as before. Not a river of motion, but stragglers adrift. Careening down the trail, they looked a little drunk or crazed, somehow.
"They're probably hungry too," Preston said. "What do they eat?"
"I have no idea," she confessed. He was right, they would surely need to eat, after hunkering in the rain for days without cease. She was embarrassed that her five-year-old was asking questions that had not occurred to her. But she refused to be first in the long line of people who would shrug him off. "We'll have to look that up."
"Look it up where?"
"Google it, I guess."
"Okay," he said.
Googling a butterfly. It sounded comical, like tickling a catfish, but she knew it wouldn't sound that way to Preston. He would clamber up to the computer at Bear and Hester's and punch the keys, finding what he needed in there. Having children was not like people said. Forget training them in your footsteps; the minute they put down the teething ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat. But Preston still asked her questions. That touched her, that they were a team. Here in the looming forest he gripped her hand tightly, as if crossing a street, as they approached the trees where the butterflies hung in their droves. Wings littered the ground. "Look up," she said, pointing at the brown clusters drooping from the branches. These trees were completely filled now. Even the tree trunks wore butterfly pelts, all the way up, like the bristling hairy legs of giants. It was a whole butterfly forest, magically draped with dark, pendulous clusters masquerading as witchy tresses or dead foliage. She only knew what they really were because her eyes had learned the secret. Preston's had not. It all waited for him, perfectly still and alive. She watched his dark pupils dart up and around, puzzling this out, looking without yet seeing. Mine, ours, her heartbeat thumped, making promises from the inside. This was better than Christmas. She couldn't wait to give him his present: sight.
"What is it?" he asked.
"That's the King Billies too. I know it looks weird, how they're all hanging down. But the whole thing is butterflies."
"Gaaa!" he cried, breaking free of her grip. He ran toward a monstrous bouquet that reached nearly to the ground from above, some thirty feet long, dwarfing a tiny boy. Before she could warn him against it, he reached up to stroke it with his hand, causing it to writhe and awaken. Wings opened and jockeyed within the clump. The lowest piece of the bristly string dropped off, landing with a plop on the ground. In slow motion it exploded, individual butterflies flapping, lifting, dispersing.
Preston looked back at her, expecting a reprimand.
"It's okay. You can check them out. Just be gentle, I guess."
She walked closer so she could see this as her son was seeing it. She hadn't examined the clumps at close range, and even now it was hard to understand how they were constructed. The butterflies didn't seem smashed or stuck to the wings of other butterflies, not like a hundred-car pileup, it was nothing so simple. They seemed to be holding on by their needle-thin front legs to some part of the tree itself, bark or branch or needle, out to the very tips. The tree's basic shape was still visible underneath, the column of trunk and broomlike sweep of the branches, but all enlarged and exaggerated by the hangers-on. Only at the ends of the dangling clusters did butterflies seem to be clinging to the legs of other butterflies. The insecure and the desperate, she thought. No world can be without them.
"Mama, they smell," Preston said.
She inhaled the air, realizing she hadn't had a cigarette for hours, but could not detect any odor. "Good or bad?" she asked. "What do they smell like?"
Very slowly Preston crossed the breach, moving his face through the last few inches between himself and this life form, until his nose touched it. He sniffed, and gave his verdict: "Good. A cross between lightning bugs and dirt."
Crystal met them at the back door with her coat already on and her purse slung over her shoulder, ready to light out of there. She had her Dear Abby letter in hand, but had put it back in its envelope.
"Crystal, I'm so sorry, I owe you. I do. We were longer than an hour. You can take my car if you need to go pick up your boys. Where's Cordie?"
"She's down for a nap. I'll just leave your car at Hester's, okay?" Crystal cut her eyes down the hallway and said in a low voice, "There's somebody at the front door."
Dellarobia saw that Roy had posted himself inches from the door, gazing directly as if he could see through the wood. He was not barking but moaning talkatively and waving the white flag of his tail tip in a slow circle. A reliable judge of character, was Roy. No real threat out there, but it needed attention.
"Who is it?"
"I don't know! They've been there, like, fifteen minutes?"
"Just standing there? Man or a woman?"
"It's a little family. A couple and a little girl."
"Good grief, Crystal, it's not an ax murderer if they brought a child with them. Maybe they need help or something. Why didn't you open the door?"
Crystal glanced sidelong at Preston and shielded the side of her mouth with the envelope. "They're foreign," she whispered.
Dellarobia stood momentarily dumbfounded, which Crystal took as her cue to exit via the kitchen door. Preston went to the front hall to stand with Roy, but she knew he wouldn't open the door, drilled as all kids were in stranger-danger. She peered out the windows in the upper part of the door, but saw nothing. She had to stand on tiptoe and look down before she could see them on the porch, the man and woman both about her own height, possibly even shorter. They looked Mexican, or very dark-skinned at any rate, especially the man. Jehovah's Witnesses? Did they travel the world for their cause?
She opened the door immediately. "May I help you?"
It was the little girl between the adults who spoke: "Preston!"
"Hi, Josefina," he said heartily, sounding like the man of the house.
Dellarobia looked from her son to this child and her parents. "Preston, is this a friend of yours?"
"She's in Miss Rose's room too," he said. The two of them hugged in an obedient, ritualistic way, like children at a family reunion, leaving Dellarobia to meet the parents' gaze feeling thoroughly adrift. The man had a large mustache and wore work clothes, a zippered jacket
and billed cap. The wife was a bit more dressed up in a summery flowered shift under her blue cardigan. This family hadn't gotten around to the winter coats either, from the looks of it. They both pumped her hand firmly and said their names, Lupe and Reynaldo and a last name she instantly forgot.
"Well, come in," she said. The child said something to the parents, and they cautiously followed, wiping their shoes on the mat and entering the house so tentatively, Dellarobia had some difficulty getting the door closed behind them. She'd halfway unbuttoned her coat before realizing, startled again, she was half naked underneath. The wet clothes she'd stripped off earlier still lay in a puddle in the hallway. These people must think they'd come calling at a pig house.
"I am so sorry to keep you standing out there. We were out. If you all would please sit down in the living room, I'll join you in just one minute. Preston, would you be a real big boy and go to the kitchen and get everybody a glass of water?"
Again the girl spoke to her parents in Spanish, exchanging several sentences this time. Whatever she told them did the trick, as they walked directly to the sofa and sat down. Dellarobia quickly checked on Cordie, who was sleeping, and then scurried to the bedroom to run a brush through her hair and put on something decent. When she returned to the living room, she saw Preston had delivered water in the plastic cups he was allowed to use: Lupe had Shrek, and Reynaldo had SpongeBob SquarePants. They held their drinks formally. Dellarobia noted the wife's plastic summer sandals worn with pantyhose, and felt for her, knowing exactly what it was like to be a season behind on every kind of payment. The man had removed his cap and placed it on the arm of the sofa. His mustache made two curved lines around the sides of his mouth like parentheses, as if everything he might say would be very quiet, and incidental. Josefina was their princess, in flowered bell-bottom stretch pants and a plaid top. She sat between her parents smiling shyly at Roy while her father held out the back of his hand for the dog to sniff, encouraging her to do the same. Roy let himself be rubbed under the chin, then went and lay down in the entrance hall, satisfied that he had secured the perimeter.
"So," Dellarobia said, wondering whether she should offer cookies. She moved a pile of clothes out of the armchair to sit down, and Preston sidled close, sitting on the carpet at her feet. "It's nice to meet one of Preston's friends. He's my oldest, so it's been kind of strange for me, sending him off to kindergarten, where he's got this whole other world I don't know about."