They had a laugh at Hester’s expense, and Dellarobia felt a twinge, wondering where her loyalties ought to lie. Certainly she had not planned to fall into any alliance with these students. But she would miss their interesting energy when they were gone. They were all headed home for Christmas, wherever home was, the following week on the twenty-first. The shortest day of the year, according to Johnny Midgeon on the radio, her main educational source. Bonnie and Mako would not be coming back with Ovid after the break, because they were only second-year graduate students and had classes to attend. Ovid taught classes just for the first semester and the rest of the year did his research. He’d recently received something called a genius grant, Bonnie explained, implying this made him a VIP. Dellarobia had heard of stars with their own trailers, but not the type where the toilet and shower did double duty. Pete also might come back, Bonnie said, because he was a postdoc doing research full-time, but he wouldn’t stay long because he had to be on campus to run Ovid Byron’s lab. Dellarobia thought of mad-scientist labs in the movies, bottles of things boiling over, and despaired at the gulf between her brain and all there was to know. The words “butterfly lab” made no sense.

When they’d dropped back a little way behind the men on the trail, Bonnie also mentioned that Pete was a newlywed. His wife didn’t like him gone too long. Dellarobia pointed her chin at the well-muscled shoulders of Pete, and asked, “Would you?”

Bonnie laughed. “I guess not.” Dellarobia thought to ask Bonnie if she was also married. She said she wasn’t.

If Hester could look past her nose, she would see these kids were not stuck up. Worldly maybe, and heedless of their good fortune, to be sure. But in some ways they seemed young for their age. Dellarobia wished she could do something for them, other than zippers and laundry. And the dilly beans she’d brought them that once, which they’d gone crazy over, practically licking out the jar as if she’d put narcotics in there with the dill and vinegar. She could certainly bring over some more from Hester’s, as they’d canned about fifty quarts. How could a person never have heard of dilly beans?

A going-away party, she thought now. Just a little gathering in her living room, Christmas cookies and eggnog. She almost brought it up to Bonnie, but her nerve failed. They were near the end of the trail, the opportunity would pass; she formed the words but found she could not say them. She was embarrassed to invite these people into her house, that was the long and short of it. A man living in a motor vehicle, the others maybe rooming next to a meth lab, but still Dellarobia couldn’t bear how they would see her life. Like the country-music diner they called “vile.” If these kids didn’t know a zipper could be replaced, they had surely not seen the likes of her Corelle plates and stained carpet and pillow-strewn rooms. Her every possession was either unbreakable, or broken.

7

Global Exchange

Every disaster proved useful for someone, it seemed, and flooding was good for the gravel business. Cub was called in to work double shifts through the weekend and into the following week, even missing church, which Hester felt was justifiable for those involved in emergency services. In Cub’s case that mostly meant delivering gravel to people whose driveways had relocated onto their downhill neighbors. But it also meant money, which brought no complaints. Dellarobia and Cub would catch up their house payments by year’s end, and everything else would go to the equipment loan, including Hester’s tour group proceeds. They’d been calling this her “butterfly money,” an apt name for such a lightweight source of funds. The impending loan payment was a balloon, and that name was not apt, for something that weighed enough to crush a family. Bear and the Money Tree men struck an agreement to wait a month for things to dry out, two months at the most, before they went ahead with the logging.

Dellarobia had hardly seen Cub since Hester’s surprising visit. She intended to mention it, but that afternoon he’d taken the monthly run to the landfill with their trash, and early the next morning she’d hiked up the mountain with Ovid and the students. When she came back, Cub was called in to work to drive gravel to a road washout, the first of many. Now she basically handed him his coffee as he went out the door. This morning she’d wondered where all their mugs had gotten to, and realized they must be rolling around empty on the floor of his truck. His shift ended at four today, and she’d asked Dovey to babysit so Cub could come with her to do some shopping for the kids. Dovey thought they should drive over to Cleary, which had fifty times more stores, at least to window-shop, but Dellarobia couldn’t afford to walk into most of those places, and recreational envy was not her idea of fun. Maybe the Walmart on this end of Cleary’s outskirts. But they ended up getting a late start, so they would just have to scavenge the subpar storefronts of Feathertown. Cub wasted a full hour putting up a whine. He was tired. A Virginia Tech game was on. Amazing, how men who had no use for college could summon such enthusiasm for college ball. “Why don’t you just go with the kids?” he’d asked. “You always do that, put Cordie in the shopping cart and go.”

“Christmas shopping? As in, Surprise, kids, Santa came?”

She hadn’t yet bought one present. A resentment of the Christmas season was fair game, she felt, for people who’ve lost their parents, have no expendable income, or both. The cedar still stood naked in their living room exuding its prickly scent, as barren of Christmas spirit as the muddy outdoor landscape. She’d asked Cub to mention to Hester they were doing Christmas morning at home this year. And maybe suggest she donate some set decoration for the affair. But she didn’t know how that was going, as she hadn’t really conversed with her husband in days.

Naturally, given an opportunity at last, she jumped in with both feet and they fell to arguing immediately. It was a rule of marriage: the more desperately you needed alone time with your spouse, the quicker you’d spoil it with a blowout. When they went out to a restaurant without kids for their anniversary a while back, they’d ended up yelling in the car, actually cracking the rear window with a pair of channel locks (hurled in anger but not actually at anyone), over why he’d left his greasy channel locks in the car, among other topics. Today’s acrimony was less athletic; they were too worn-out now for the major leagues. It was more of an endurance event, dragged through several errands across the four-block span of Feathertown: first the gas station, where she only let him fill the tank halfway so she could buy a carton of cigarettes for a price that nearly brought her to tears, swearing she’d make them last out the month, knowing she would not. Next, the discount hardware where they exchanged the fixture he’d picked up to replace their leaky kitchen faucet, because he’d gotten the wrong kind, as any idiot could plainly see. Now they hauled their dysfunctional date into the dollar store, where they hoped to provision their kids with a memorable holiday for something in the neighborhood of fifty dollars.