Preston lit up. Dellarobia let him come to the study site sometimes after school, finding simple things for him to do that made him insanely happy. Dr. Byron didn't seem to mind, even when Preston hung around him with too much vigor, throwing his arms around Dr. Byron's legs by way of greeting. Attaching like a barnacle, Ovid called it. "Here is my friend, Barnacle Bill!" And the cautious response, "No, Barnacle Preston." The sight of them together filled Dellarobia with complicated emotions she had to ignore.
Past the crutches was a giant rack of purses: fake leopard, red sequins, gold lame. So many, you'd think the world contained nothing but females and their money. Cordie dropped the pillow and went for an extra-large fake alligator bag. She took off after Preston at her fast little trot, grabbing bottom-shelf items and stuffing them in the purse. A shoplifter-in-training. When they were gone, Dovey asked, "So who else is in love with Dr. Butterfly, besides Preston Turnbow and his mother?"
"He's my boss, Dovey."
"He's your boss, and you blush every time his name is spoken."
She made no answer. They arrived in the toy and child-equipment area, which was hopping with unsupervised children. She watched Preston and Cordie move down a long line of child-safety seats on the floor, carefully sitting in each and every one.
"What level of seriousness are we discussing here," Dovey prodded, "on a scale of one to ten? Eight being that hottie friend of Cub's that used to bring you wood chips, nine being that kid that lured you up there to quote-unquote end your life. I'm not even counting the geezer at Rural Incorporated."
A federal assistance representative, a tree trimmer, a lineman who was frankly a child: all her life, men had been lining up, it seemed, to ask nothing of her whatsoever. Her mother's social security number, baby where'd you get those eyes, the hard questions had topped out right around there. Until now. None of those men ever saw the person inside. Or the one she might become. Dovey had hit on the subject she couldn't discuss. "Zero point zero," Dellarobia said. "He has a wife."
"And gripes about her cooking."
"Not really. To tell you the truth, he never talks about her at all."
"No heat in the kitchen, then."
"I don't know. I just know he's not very happy."
Dovey cocked an eyebrow. "And there'll be happiness," she sang, "for every girl and boy." Clint Black, slightly revised.
Dellarobia watched Preston tug a pair of water wings onto his sister's arms over her sweater. "You need these so you won't fall in the water and drown," he advised. Cordie flapped her inflated wings and ran from him in loopy circles like some kind of moth. Then abruptly stopped and climbed aboard a rocking horse.
Dellarobia said, "I don't want to play this game."
Dovey pushed her cart away without a word, steering around a fake tiger rug with sad-looking eyes. Dellarobia stayed where she was, in Playland, fighting back inexplicable tears as she walked through what seemed like acres of bike helmets and strollers and child safety seats. Every ambulatory child in the store was here flinging toys around, tentatively cavorting with strangers. Older kids were patently bossing the younger ones, shouting, "You're going to break that!" Or the universal affront, "That's for babies." She browsed a shelf of one-dollar toys, pausing on an alphabet-learning contraption called Little Smarty. It had dials that turned to match letters to pictures, the kind of thing Preston could play with all day long. But the name put her off. Obviously it was manufactured in a different era. What modern parent wanted her kids to be Little Smarties? The word was a rebuke: smart-mouth, smarty-pants. Don't get smart with me.
A grandmother-toddler team joined her at the toy shelf, the kid leaning out of his stroller in all directions to grab anything he could. Every child on the premises was being conveyed by a Mammaw, it seemed. This one idly handed her grandson a plastic baseball bat, which he turned around and choked up on like a pro, swinging at nearby shoppers. Dellarobia scooted away and found Dovey with Cordie on her hip checking out a throng of baby dolls gathered under a sign: SMALL BABIES 50C/, ALL OTHERS $1. The petite devalued as usual, Dellarobia thought with rancor. Poor Preston, if he didn't start catching up to his classmates soon, she might join Cub in his prayers for their son's growth spurt. "Have it, have it?" Cordelia chanted as Dovey picked up dollies and made them talk. The selection was overwhelming. Few looked like actual babies, and some were weirdly sexy, with factory-installed eye shadow and big pouty lips. Cordie grabbed the homeliest of the lot and shoved it head-down in her alligator bag.
"Baby!" she declared when she saw her mother, offering it up for approval. The thing had a potato-like head, created by someone who'd stuffed a nylon stocking and sculpted the eyes, mouth, and cheekbones with a needle and thread.
"Sorry," Dovey said, "I'm buying your daughter the March of Dimes child."
"Look at all those tiny stitches. Can you imagine?"
Dovey gave the doll a second look before setting Cordie down. "Hester could probably make things like that. She does all those crafty woolly things."
"If only she were grandchild-inclined." Dellarobia pictured her own mother hand-stitching a doll. The grandma Cordie would never meet, like the fish that got away.
Immediately behind them, a twenty-foot-long wooden crate of fifty-cent sweaters was attracting attention. Shoppers surrounded it on all sides like livestock at a trough, churning the contents. Winter had dawned on the neighborhood.
"Oh, man, look at this!" Dellarobia extracted a huge Crayola-orange sweater.
"Yikes," Dovey said. "You put that on Cub, y'all will look like a solar system."
Dellarobia laughed. "It's not for anybody to wear. There are these girls up on the mountain that are knitting monarch butterflies out of old sweaters."
"Excuse me?"
"They pull sweaters apart to get the yarn. Recycled. That's their big thing." Dellarobia tried to assemble words to describe the ragamuffin girls who were camping out near the study site. "They're from England," she said. That was a starting point.
"And they crossed the ocean blue to come here and pull sweaters apart?"
"Well, yeah, they're crazy, number one. I guess they don't have kids or anything. They saw us on the news and came to do a sit-in against the logging, and now it's a sit-in about global warming. They sit up there all day and knit little monarch butterflies out of recycled orange yarn. They hang them all over the trees. It looks kind of real."
Dovey looked skeptical.
"It's on the Internet," Dellarobia maintained. "They told me they have this campaign of asking people to send in their orange sweaters, to help save the butterflies. For these girls to rip up, and knit with. They're getting boxes and boxes of sweaters, that much I can tell you. Anything with 'butterflies' in the address comes to our house."
"This I have got to see." Dovey had her phone out. "What do I search?"
Dellarobia thought for a moment. "Knit the Earth," she said. "Or Women Knit the Earth. Something like that."
Dovey's eyes grew large. "Holy cow," she said, standing by the sweater bin, peering into the World Wide Web. "This is happening on your property? It's like, huge. They've got over a thousand Likes on Facebook."
"So that's a lot?" As usual Dellarobia felt out of the loop. She had squirreled $110 into her account thus far, her computer fund, but dreaded asking Dovey about prices. She probably wouldn't get in the ballpark before her job ended next month.
"W-O-M-Y-N," Dovey added. "That's who's knitting the Earth."
"Well, they're from England," Dellarobia said. "Maybe spelling is not their long suit. These girls are kind of rough. But they're good knitters, you should see their little monarch butterflies. Are there photos?"
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 r
eally 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. E
nemy 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?"