Ramona Ausubel - Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

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Fern thought about the story. She thought about the way the poles change and draw people close, push them away. “Would she have left you if your mother hadn’t turned out to have money?”

“I doubt it. Being good-looking is a help, but she still would have been an eighteen-year-old divorced mother. I doubt she would have trusted her chances without the bank account. A person can afford to be brave when money is on the table.”

“Did she remarry?”

“I don’t know anything except this address. Not one single thing.”

“What about your half of the money?” Fern asked.

“It’s in a savings account. The things I want are not for sale.”

Fern knew he meant love. She knew he meant family. Everything she was driving at high speed away from. She thought about the giant’s job at the bank, him sitting there in his security guard outfit with a dog-eared book and a half-eaten sandwich. It was the kind of job she would have expected someone to quit if his mother had saved almost a million dollars playing the lottery. She asked if he had considered it.

“I like working. A reason for being.”

The good ladies and gentlemen where Fern came from would have scorned people like these: a woman like Mac’s mother, an immigrant, all those cheap red roses, the Catholicism, lace doilies on each surface, a too-big man who took pleasure from his unprestigious day job. “It’s funny that of the two of us, you’re the rich one,” Fern said.

He winked at her. “Tables turn, eh? Better be nice to me.”

Now it was truly hot. All the way south, and the air was nearly swimmable. They passed a series of hand-painted signs advertising something called the Regal Reptile Ranch and Menagerie. The sign read Over 20 Gators Plus 7-Foot Anaconda Cottonmouth Tegu Coachwhips Beaded Lizards Fox Snake Rat Snake Cobra .

They stopped for gas. Fern went inside the service station to pay. She added red licorice, a pack of Pall Malls and a bottle of Coke, and held the cold glass to her forehead. The man behind the counter was too handsome to work in a service station. He had long hair and a mustache, and he was wearing blue coveralls stained with grease. Minus the outfit, he belonged at an expensive party near the blue light of the swimming pool, all the girls topless or better.

“Well,” he said. “Am I glad you walked in. Have you come far?”

“Boston,” she said. Where were they now, anyway? Louisiana, someplace with no plants she could name, a completely different kind of forest out the window all morning. “Are you from nearby?”

“Marquette,” he said. He hit the buttons on his register, left off the candy. “That’s for you, from me,” he said. He was a beautiful boy with a suntan that probably never faded, no winter to speak of in this part of the country. A man needed to own a good wool coat to be trusted. A man needed to be able to go outside in the pink of a snowy morning and scrape what was iced, shovel what was blanketed.

The bell clinked and the giant walked in. He went towards the Ice Cold Drinks sign, opened the chest and let out a cloud of cold.

“Holy shit,” the handsome boy said, in a whisper. He leaned in to Fern, and they were kiss-close. “What a freak,” he whispered. His breath was stale-smoky and she noticed a freckle on his lower lip.

“Him?” she said. “He’s my husband .” Discomfort tangled that pretty face and it was the best thing she had felt all week. It was good to cause pain to someone who deserved it.

When Fern was in high school, one of her friends’ fathers had a long, public affair with a bank teller not more than two years older than his daughter. The girl’s mother drank, wrecked her Cadillac, became a point of gossip and ridicule. Fern remembered wondering why the wife didn’t simply turn love off, like a spigot. Her husband was a bad person, cruel and unforgivable, and it seemed like it should have been so easy to walk away.

In the car Fern opened the pack of cigarettes. “I felt like smoking,” she said. She lit, coughed, inhaled again.

“Give me one of those,” he said, and she lit a cigarette for him too.

Fern flicked ash out her window. “I don’t love Edgar less than before the kiss,” Fern said. “I should. I know what other women would think of me. I’m still angry with him and I still want to hurt him and I still don’t know if I’ll forgive it, and I still don’t know if he’ll ever forgive me, but even taken together those feelings are nothing compared to how much else has gathered over our years together.” It might still drown you, but love got deeper with time.

The giant put his cigarette out in the ashtray. “That tasted too good,” he said. “Don’t let me smoke too much.”

They paralleled the railroad tracks for the next few hours, and then a train chuffed alongside them at nearly the same speed and Fern could see the dining car in which a single man in a cowboy hat sat reading a newspaper while three cheap-suited servers stood in wait. Fern could almost hear the coffee cup rattle on his saucer.

Mac slowed suddenly and gasped, and when Fern turned back to see, it was not a stopped car or a deer he braked for, but a flock of butterflies, hundreds of orange wings, tinking into the windshield. Some caught in the wipers, some hit and spun off. Mac put his arm out across Fern to hold her in while the car lurched to a stop. He jumped out, and then stood there for a long time, mute, looking up at the colored sky.

Fern was hit by the heat as she picked the dead flyers off the windshield. Their bodies were warm and their gorgeous wings nearly dissolved at her touch. Most she tossed onto the roadside. One, still half-beating, she dropped and quietly crushed under her shoe. She hoped Mac did not see. Maggie the dog came back to her.

“I need to use the phone again,” Fern said. “At the next place.”

An hour later she stood at a payphone that was almost too hot to hold in her hand and deposited a handful of quarters. This time she did not call her own house. The secretary at the vet answered and Fern said, “Don’t kill my dog. I don’t want you to put Maggie to sleep.”

* * *

THE BOYS HAD BEEN GIVEN a teepee for Christmas last year, which Cricket realized with a sweep of joy that woke her up at dawn and jigged her blood. She did not bother the sleeping boys before she ran into the basement and found it, dusty and toppled, next to a box of abandoned stuffed animals and a rusted lawn mower. She carried the poles out to the lawn first and had to stand on a chair to attach the fabric. She was good at this, which did not surprise her. The teepee was not big, but Cricket figured if they curled up they could all three lie down inside.

It smelled like motor oil and there were inelegant pictures of deer and arrows, but through the hole in the middle were the three crossed poles and beyond them the blue sky, and those things were true beyond this backyard, beyond their neighborhood, beyond the parentlessness. Wherever their mother and father were, the sky also was, and Maggie was under it too. Cricket went into the house and dragged her boys out of bed saying, “Come see, come see the home I’ve made for us.” They were as pleased as she was, and immediately they all went gathering blankets to make a rug, pillows for comfort, the stash of canned goods, suitcases with clothes. They tried to make a fire by rubbing sticks together but could not even get a spark or tinder so they brought matches and a newspaper with a cover story about a Mafioso who’d donated thousands to charity on the same day he had killed three people. They burned it. The man’s face, red from the Florida sun, went black and ashed. The children were filled with celebration. They were native to this backyard and it was morning-cold and the sun was coming over the lip of the roof and they were eating breakfast out of a can. The boys, in unison, said, “Let’s never go to school ever again.” Cricket knew what they meant and here they were with no adult supervision and no one to make them behave. The trouble was that she wanted to go to school. She wanted to see Miss Nolan, she wanted to go to the bathroom, turn the lights off and find out what would happen.