Food, here at least was something sensible to buy. She loaded up on two-dollar boxes of mac and cheese, and picked through the cereal looking for those with fewer marshmallow-caliber ingredients. Down the aisle she spied Cub standing near the coffee, and there was Crystal Estep, good night. With her boys nowhere in evidence, Crystal was all smiles, beaming up at Cub's great height, leaning against her cart in a backward tilt that threw her pelvis forward like a kindergartner doing stretching exercises. Crystal spotted Dellarobia, waved at her, and shoved off, leaving Cub to peruse the coffee. Dellarobia steered toward her husband, vowing to try and be sweet, but of course he picked up the can of Folgers. "Put it back, Cub," she said. "Get the store brand."
"I thought we liked the Folgers."
"Six dollars. The store brand is one seventy-five. Which one do we like?"
They arrived together at the Last Chance section at the end of the aisle, ridiculously low-priced items that had gone past their expiration dates. She got a canister of lemonade mix and some fruit cocktail. Who knew canned fruit could expire?
"How's Miss Crystal?" she asked.
"Motormouth, like always," Cub said. "Somebody needs to adjust her idle."
Dellarobia laughed. "That's not nice."
"She says she wants you to look at her letter she's writing to Dear Abby."
"Oh, for crying out loud. Again? You should see that thing, it's like twenty pages long. She ought to apply some of that stick-to-itiveness to getting her GED."
Dellarobia was amazed to see what wound up in the Last Chance section, not just food but also strange hair products and such. Packs of gum. And a packet of condoms! Who in their right mind would buy expired condoms? she wondered. It seemed like the very definition of a bad bargain. Cub naturally went for the hot-fudge-sundae toaster pastries, which she wanted to snatch from his hand and smack against his big belly. But she decided not to add Cub's weight issues into today's fun lineup. If she could pretend ice-cream-flavored breakfast snacks did not cause obesity, he might overlook the less advantageous aspects of lung cancer.
"Hey, buddy! Who's this pretty little lady?" A tall, narrow man in a raincoat and old-fashioned fedora reached across their shopping cart, evil swan and all, to shake Cub's hand. Cub introduced her to Greg, his supervisor at the gravel company.
"So what do you think?" Greg winked at her. "Is it time to start building an ark?"
Ha-ha-ha-ha. Dellarobia was ready for her world to get some new material. Cub chatted with him about how busy they'd been at work. She wondered why the boss would be shopping at the dollar store. Sometimes it seemed nobody at all had any money. But he was management, wasn't there maybe a small step up? A two-dollar store? She hung around long enough to seem polite before waggling her fingers good-bye and pushing on. Cub caught up to her in the dog food aisle.
"Mother and Dad feed the dogs," he said.
"Roy spends half his life at our house, in case you didn't notice. When I bummed some Purina off Hester last time, she let me know her feelings. So we need dog food."
Cub studied the offerings and obediently hefted the store brand from the bottom shelf, priced at $4 for the fifteen-pound bag, undoubtedly made of garbage. Rather than the $10 name-brand bag placed at eye level. Cub had retained the lesson from the coffee aisle, she appreciated that, but she felt terrible skimping on Roy. He was a perfect dog, he didn't deserve poverty rations. He should apply for a position in a better household.
"So that's your boss," she said.
"Yep, that's Greg. Large and in charge."
"You could take him," Dellarobia said. "Blindfolded. I'd put money on you."
Cub smiled. "Here's what you need for Christmas." He held up a ceramic mug that read, "Out of My Mind, Back in Five Minutes."
She grinned back. Maybe this fight was over. Maybe they'd even have make-up sex. If they could get out of here without another go-round over the kids and their g-d Real Christmas. She wondered how many divorces could be traced directly to holiday spending. "You know what, hon? We need to face the toy aisle again."
Cub followed her down the end zone and back into the mind-numbing array of unacceptable choices. She picked up a toy ax and jovially pretended to murder Mickey Mouse. Cub's mind was elsewhere. He blew his breath out, looking worried. She put down her weapon. "What? Did Greg say something?"
"No, just . . . I'm thinking about that logging. How are we supposed to decide?"
"I don't know. Look at the facts?"
"What are they?" he asked.
As if she knew. They both stood flummoxed before the T-Rex power squirt guns, sonic blasters, and light-up puffer worm-balls that smelled insidiously toxic.
"Well, for one thing," she said, "when you clear-cut a mountain it can cause a landslide. I'm not crying wolf here, Cub, it's a fact. You can see it happening where they logged over by the Food King, there's a river of mud sliding over the road. And that's exactly what happened in Mexico, where the butterflies were before. They clear-cut the mountain, and a flood brought the whole thing down on top of them. You should see the pictures on the Internet."
She wished she hadn't seen them herself, they haunted her so. There were children involved, a school buried. Her mind would not quit posing horror-movie images against her will, and questions she didn't want asked. Would a village just flatten like a house of cards? Or would the homes lift and float, the way vehicles did, giving a person some time to get out?
"That's Mexico," Cub said. "This is here."
"Yeah. You know what I keep thinking? Our house is ours," she said. "It's not much, and I'm the first one to say it. But we've made every payment since we married. The house is the one thing you and I have got."
Her intensity got his attention. "Did you tell him about that business in Mexico?"
She knew who he meant. Ovid Byron. "No, I haven't. It's too weird. It's like the butterflies came here, and we might be next. Like they're a sign of something." She was trying to keep the scientists out of her argument for keeping the mountain intact. Their wonder, their global worries, these of all things would not help her case with Cub. Teams had been chosen, and the scientists were not us, they were them. That's how Cub would see it. Everyone had to play.
"This rain won't keep up," he said. "They're saying it's a hundred-year flood. So it won't happen again for another hundred years."
Dellarobia knew this was wrong, bad luck didn't work that way. A person could have a long losing streak. But she didn't understand that well enough to explain. "It just seems shortsighted," she said. "If we log the mountain, then the trees are gone. But the debt isn't. Does it make sense to turn everything upside down just to make one payment? Like there won't be another one next month, and the month after that?"
"It's just the one balloon. Things will perk up. Dad will get more contracts."
"And meanwhile our house might get buried in mud, that's the deal?"
"Dad says they wouldn't log up there if there was any risk to it."
"The hell they wouldn't. You notice he's not planning to do any logging up above his and Hester's house."
"Well, you try discussing it with Dad," he said. "Would Preston like this?"
She took the flat, shrink-wrapped package he handed her. A dinosaur puzzle. "Not really," she said. "That's kind of for younger kids." Not for the first time, she thought of Mako and Bonnie, wondering if they'd played with toys like these, or if their parents gave them educational things for a head start. If Preston wanted to go to college someday, he was already behind. That, too, went with playing on Cub's team. She looked up from the puzzle.
"Do you know what they're saying about the butterflies being here? Dr. Byron and them? They said it means something's really gone wrong."
"Wrong with what?" Cub asked.
"The whole earth, if you want to know. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff they said, Cub. It's like the End of Days. They need some time to figure out what it all means. Don't you think that's kind of important?"
"Well, if
the butterflies fly off somewhere, the doctor and them can go park their camper behind somebody else's barn."
"What if there's no place else for them to fly away to?" she asked.
"There's always someplace else to go," Cub said, in a tone that said he was signing off: Worries like that are not for people like us. We have enough of our own. He wasn't wrong.
"But what if there isn't?" she persisted quietly.
"How about this, for Preston? I had these," Cub said. Tinkertoys, or a plastic version of that, in an enormous boxed kit. It was not your father's Tinkertoys, so to speak. Now they had countless extras, including a little motor to run your creations around on the floor until someone stepped on them and punctured an artery.
She and Cub both inhaled at the price. He put it back.
"So your dad says take the money and run. What do you say?"
"I don't know." Cub blew out his breath, looking at the ceiling. "It would just be nice to have some room. To have a real Christmas for the kids."
It would be. Of course. She wanted the world for Cordie and Preston. But what did that even mean? "What's real?" she asked. "Anything in this store? We should just buy them each a box of the most sugary cereal there is, and go home. They're so young, would they really know the difference?"
Cordie might actually go for the sugar-pop Christmas, but Preston wouldn't. Everyone got children so jacked up about Santa Claus. Preston had told his kindergarten teacher that Santa was bringing him a wristwatch, information that Miss Rose passed on to Dellarobia with a conspiratorial grin, as if she'd done the hard part. Now the parents only had to make the thing materialize. This afternoon she'd kept her eye out for a toy one, but what a letdown that would be, a plastic watch from Santa. She could already see her son's brave Christmas-morning face, trying not to be disappointed. The watch he coveted was Mako's, an outsize black thing with tiny yellow buttons, timers and such. Mako had let him play with it. Those students were sweet to Preston, nothing like television geeks, actually the opposite, surprisingly astute about a child's interest and abilities. So now Preston had a killer crush on the whole bunch, dying for their notice. He spent afternoons lurking around the trailer pretending to turn over rocks, working his angles, provoking Dellarobia into a protective defensiveness. He shouldn't throw himself on his sword out there. Why should he even see things he couldn't have?
Cub was studying a large packaged thing that looked like a toy television, with appendages. "You know what he really wants. Super Mario Brothers and Battletron."
"He just hears about those from other kids," Dellarobia argued. "He doesn't really know what they are yet."
"We should get him a Wii."
"So you could play with it," she said, feeling exasperation rise.
"It's educational," Cub maintained.
"If you're interested in your son's education, get him a computer. If you happen to find a wallet full of money. He's getting on the Internet over at Hester's, looking at pictures. He can just about read, did you know that? He knows a bunch of words."
"Great. If he turns out smart like you I'll be outnumbered for good."
She felt blindsided. "Being smart, you're going to hold that against me? What kind of message is that sending the kids?"
"You tell me. If you want them to have a computer and stuff, we need the logging money. Or"--he spread his hands--"we can keep our trees. And be hicks."
"Right. We cut down the trees and get ourselves buried in mud like a bunch of hillbillies, because we're afraid of raising our kids to be dumb hillbillies. Really you're saying we just do it because that's who we are," she said, too loudly. "Who are we?"
"Dellarobia, for Christ's sakes, do you have to make everything hard?"
"Hester agrees with me," she said. "Your mother doesn't think it's right to clear-cut the mountain. She told me that, the day she came to the house."
He looked at her, uncomprehending. Dellarobia watched as he rearranged the whole game in his head, and saw his features slacken, defeat rising through to the top. The women who ruled, against him. Of course he would see it that way. They faced each other, a towering, morose man and his small, miserable wife, both near tears. How could two people both lose an argument?
"All I'm asking is just one simple thing," he said. "For the kids to have their Christmas."
People wrecked their worlds for less. She knew that. She'd been so keen on her one great day in the sack, she almost threw away everything, kids included. What a hypocrite, feeling sorry for herself now because she couldn't buy them yuppie-grade toys. She suddenly felt so allergic to Chinese plastic she couldn't breathe. "When you get your one simple thing figured out, let me know," she said. "I'll be out in the parking lot."
Having a seventy-five-cent smoke, she thought bleakly. She headed for the exit lane, but something stopped and held her eye. Of all things, a cloth potholder shaped like a monarch butterfly. Unbelievable. It was hanging in a display of incidental items, jar openers and such, as if it had been passing through and landed there for a moment's rest. The colors made it stand out. She reached on tiptoe to take it down and found that it was surprisingly well made, really like nothing else she'd seen in here. The black stripes were accurately placed, right down to the two black dots on the lower wings. Did they even have monarchs in China? She did not know. But somewhere far from here, someone had taken the trouble to get this exactly right. She smoothed it in her hands and pictured a real person, a small woman in a blue paper hairnet seated at a sewing machine. Someone her own size, a mother most likely, working the presser foot up and down to maneuver the careful lines and acute angles of that stitching. Scrolling out a message, whatever it might be. Get me out of here.
And what if there was no other place?
She strode to the checkout lane and flipped the potholder on the counter. The yellow-apron lady picked it up for a closer look, observing the quality. "Now that's real pretty," she said, sounding surprised. "That'd make a nice hostess gift."
"Actually it's for my son," Dellarobia said, rounding up four crumpled dollars from her coat pockets. The lady took her money and tilted her head back to look through the close-up part of her glasses, examining the nut-case customer.
Dellarobia shrugged, pointing at the little black dots. "Not that anybody probably cares. But it's a male."
Thanks to Dovey, she went through with the Christmas party. Dovey was keen to check out this Ovid Byron figure, and scolded Dellarobia for her reticence. "When did you get to be such a wimp?"
"Am I a wimp?" She racked her brain for evidence to the contrary. She thought of herself opening the door that day when Crystal had cowered behind it, hiding from a family of Mexicans averaging less than five feet in height. But common sense did not equal courage, and neither did wearing a fox stole to church. She did recall what it felt like to turn heads every time she walked into a room, as small as she was, empowered somehow with solidity. Confident that she had everything in her that larger people contained, with no wasted space, and a whole lot more in mind. She and Dovey used to drive over to Cleary and hang out in bars pretending to be airline stewardesses or software engineers, whatever they'd cooked up en route. It had still seemed possible they might become these things, which gave credence to their constructions. No matter how outrageous the story, men believed them. Once Dellarobia put on her glasses and claimed to be Jane Goodall's assistant. She and Dovey had seen a show on this lady scientist, and had plenty of chimp facts at hand. The guy who'd been hitting on Dellarobia turned around and asked if she could get him a job. He didn't even pause to wonder what Jane Goodall's executive team would be doing in Cleary.
Today Dovey made her a deal. She would make the grocery run for the party when she got off work at three, while Dellarobia dug around in the junk drawers of her former valor, trying to locate the nerve. Somewhere between outrage and giving up, that was where she found it. She was sick of begging for ornaments to hang on a tree, as part of some year-end conspiracy of alleged joy and goodwill arriv
ing from heaven with no hard currency as backup. Fed up with stories about poor people with good hearts raising their damn cups of kindness. Sick of needing permission to throw a party in her own home, and not asking, because she was too proud to beg favors in this family. That's how the simple folk lived, in her particular Christmas story. It was overdue for a rewrite. After taking half a tablet from her ten-year-old Valium bottle to keep from losing her nerve, she tromped out to the trailer and stuck a note on the door, inviting them all to come over when they got back from their day's work.
The scientists knocked off early that afternoon, a rainy day, big surprise, and came right over to partake in the cheer, leaving their jackets and muddy boots on the back porch. Ovid came in with two wrapped gifts for the kids, which could not be opened before Christmas, he said, rendering them thrilled and manic. Ovid was wearing his all-star smile that showed his dazzling, slightly lapped eyeteeth. Dellarobia had gone a tad manic herself, baking multiple trays of cookies shaped like stars and bells, which she'd set up for the kids to decorate at the kitchen table. Cordie stood on a chair while Preston knelt on the one beside her, smearing on the icing with the back of a spoon and micromanaging his sister's use of the sprinkles. Preston went immediately into show-off mode in front of the students, announcing he was doing an experiment. He mixed the red and green icing together, yielding a brown-colored product that was not going to be a big seller in any household familiar with diaper changes. Dellarobia just laughed, scraped it out, and started over, no big deal. Powdered sugar was about the cheapest of edible substances. It was one of the mysteries of grocery store economics.
Dovey cranked up Shakira and lured everyone into the living room, dancing around in her slinky silver sweater and a Santa hat bobby-pinned onto her mop of brown curls. The children quickly abandoned the cookies for the living room too, bedazzled to witness a celebration in their home involving adults. Cordie anchored herself to the middle of the floor, bouncing to the music, and loudly sang "Rudolph" over whatever else was playing, hamming for applause. Dellarobia felt young and fearless again watching Dovey snap her fingers and pump her elbows, walking around tipping bourbon into everyone's eggnog. And flirting, Dovey being Dovey. Applying a full-court press to Pete, even though fully apprised of his marital status. They were just having fun, and if someone ended up with the SpongeBob glass, Dellarobia didn't care. She hadn't had a cigarette for hours, and did feel at a certain point as if she might chew up the carpet, but this was overshadowed by her sense of accomplishment. She'd thrown a party.