Flight Behavior (35 page)

Dovey had paused to commune with her phone, probably remembering to text Felix about his wallet and while she was at it, check the weather in Daytona Beach or something. Dellarobia knew little about Internet devices, except that her son’s hunger for information was already pulling in that direction. Since the day of her first paycheck and
last
last smoke she’d paid up the mortgage and opened a bank account in her own name. Cub knew about the former, not the latter. He didn’t even know exactly what she earned. Dellarobia handled the finances.

She followed Preston around the corner into a world of housewares, somewhat randomly assembled, shockingly cheap. The linen section had uniform pricing: blankets, bedspreads, and curtains all two dollars each; sheets one dollar. She couldn’t believe her eyes. New sheets, even of the worst quality, cost a fortune. She found twin sheets for Preston’s bed and a set for their double plus two crib sheets, six bucks total, and stuffed these finds around Cordelia, who was not taking kindly to being hemmed in. Briefly Dellarobia confronted the thought of Cordie outgrowing her crib, the kids getting too old to share intimate space. Everyone in their little house was going along with the story they could afford: that no one would grow, nothing would change.

Dovey wheeled her cart up to join them. “Whoah. You’re buying used sheets? You don’t know who’s slept in those.”

“As opposed to the sheets at your house. Where I do know.”

“Good point,” Dovey said. “Nothing a little Clorox won’t cure.”

An elderly woman pawed through sheets while the little boy at her side yanked down slick bedspreads from a pile, inciting waterfalls of polyester. The woman crooned in a steady voice without ever looking up: “You’re a stinker, Mammaw is going to give you to the froggies. Mammaw is going to throw you in the garbage can.” Dellarobia pushed Cordie out of earshot, not that she was above such thoughts, but still. They should be the accent pieces of a parenting style, not wall-to-wall carpet. At the far end of bedspreads, a leather-skinned man was unfolding comforters to assess their heft. He picked out two extra bulkies and wheeled toward the checkout with nothing else in his cart. Homeless. So free enterprise was standing in for the charities on both ends here.

“Look at this,” Dellarobia said, amazed to find handmade quilts and afghans tucked between ratty blankets, all in the same two-dollar category. She spread out a crocheted afghan in hues of blue and purple. “So much work went into this, and now it’s lying here begging. Why would somebody give this away?”

“Mammaw died,” Dovey proposed, “and the kids are trying to forget her.”

Dellarobia put the afghan in her cart to save its dignity. Dovey arranged a pair of crocheted watermelon slices over her shirt like a bikini, but tossed them back as Preston approached. He was carrying a pillow that looked like a pig wearing a tutu.

“I thought Cordie might like this,” he said. Cordie reached for the ballerina pig and let out a howl that earned some attention from nearby shoppers.

“Tell you what, Preston. Let’s get her out and you two can poke around together. But stay right with her, okay?” Dellarobia knew he would. Cordie threw her arms around the pig and ran after her brother. Dovey perused a shelf of exercise tapes:
Atlas Abs
,
Bun Buster
. The floor beyond was crowded with exercise equipment in like-new condition, cast aside in haste. This place was a museum of people’s second thoughts. Dellarobia clucked her tongue. “New year’s resolutions didn’t last a month.”

“Christmas presents,” Dovey agreed. “All those husbands and wives dreaming of a slim, sexy version of the old ball and chain.”

Cordie and Preston were about thirty feet away, trying out what he was calling the “exercise things.” Dellarobia heard him say, “Mama won’t get that for you, we can’t afford it.” She kept the kids in her radar as she and Dovey ambled past a row of Venetian blinds and bathroom items. The categories were mysterious.

“Here you go.” Dovey brandished a rolling pin engraved with the words “Husband Tamer.”

“Now see, they should sell that as a package with the exercise equipment. To help keep the old ball and chain on the bike. Like an extended warranty.”

They exited the aisle and encountered a sobering wall of crutches hanging on a huge pegboard. Wooden crutches, aluminum walkers, items the previous owners were definitely glad to get out of the house. Some were barely used, souvenirs of some kid’s brief hiatus from school sports, while others had a deep gloss of wear on the hand grips, and rubber tips as worn as the oldest of shoe leather. Whoever gave those up had moved into some other mode of transport. By wheelchair or by pallbearer.

At the end of another aisle, a couple of college-age kids were removing everything from a shelf, presumably because they wanted to buy the shelf. They wore shorts and flip-flops, and the girl had a tattoo that resembled barbed wire encircling her ankle. Dellarobia imagined their lives, setting up some little apartment. Unmarried.

“What’s with these kids running around half naked in winter?” Dovey asked.

The maternal tone surprised Dellarobia. “Maybe winter’s not that big a deal for them,” she suggested. “They probably don’t have to be outside their cars or buildings that much.” She found herself fascinated by this young pair. A store employee materialized and began to argue with them, putting items back on the shelf with exaggerated fatigue as he shook his head. Evidently this was routine. College kids were all over the clothing racks too. She’d watched a girl with an expensive haircut and highlights try on the same green blazer Dellarobia was now wearing around the store. Maybe that’s why she’d kept it on, competition. That girl had a fat, sparkly diamond on her necklace and probably a daddy paying her tuition. She didn’t need to be here.

Preston appeared, with Cordie in tow, making his way down the aisle carrying a box with a handle that was much too heavy for him. A slide projector, she could see from the picture on the box. One of those carousel things they used in ancient history.

“I thought Dr. Byron could use this,” Preston said.

“You know what? Maybe he could. Let’s leave it here, but I’ll ask him.” She checked the tag. “Ten dollars is a good price. You can tell him about it Monday.”

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 lamé. 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 50¢, 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?”