“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 arriving 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.