Now of course it came down to which house had the childproof electric outlets. Dovey lived ten minutes away in a duplex owned by her brother in what passed for suburban Feathertown. This morning she’d helped Dellarobia knock off a pile of year-end tax documents and two loads of laundry, with more to go, plus the deconstruction of the weird Christmas tree, which made the kids whiny. No, mine, no, Cordelia shrieked as Dellarobia wrested nickels from her little paws, to discard the hooks. She asked Preston to unfold the dollar bills and flatten them for future use, but he was sentimental about Mako’s birds. “We have to keep them for next Christmas!” he wailed as Dellarobia pocketed them one by one, criminally hoping they’d add up to a carton of cigarettes.

“We’ll make more next Christmas,” she said.

Preston threw himself on the couch. “Mako probably won’t even be here.”

Dovey asked if some law of physics made children apply equal and opposite energy to both ends of the Christmas season. They made no real protest when Dellarobia sent them to their room. Cordie made a nest of toys on the floor and Preston sat on his bed attending to The Watch, pressing its buttons and holding it to his ear, an activity that might engage him into his teenage years, from the looks of it. He was also fond of his gift from Dr. Byron, a calendar with a huge color photo of a different endangered species for every month. Preston could not yet name all the months in order, but had memorized these animals in a day.

Dellarobia fetched the next load of laundry from the dryer and dumped it on the bed in her cluttered bedroom, where she and Dovey could hide, out of the kids’ line of sight. She turned on the radio to cover their conversation, keeping it low enough she would still hear a slap fight, should one arise. Cordie was always the instigator. Dellarobia began dismantling the octopus of warm, stuck-together clothing, pulling out socks, while Dovey tried to fold tiny flannel shirts whose seams puckered like lettuce.

“I forgot to tell you, I have a date,” Dovey said. “You can do my hair. I brought over this new flatiron I bought. It’s got, like, an earth’s-core setting.”

“You’re straightening your hair for some guy? Must be love.” Dellarobia yanked on a twist of threads that connected two unmatched socks like an umbilical cord. “Is this Felix? I thought he was just the flavor of the month.” Felix was a bartender in Cleary, allegedly hot. Dellarobia had not met him and doubted she would.

“Scam potential,” Dovey said. “It’s this big bartender-wait-staff blowout, so other guys will be there too. They all worked long shifts last night, so tonight they rage.”

New Year’s Eve was the occasion of their long shifts the previous night. Dellarobia and Cub had put the kids to bed and split one beer on the couch watching a CMT special while waiting to watch that sparkly ball drop for reasons no one seemed to recall anymore. Cub agreed to stop changing channels for nearly an hour, which for Cub signaled high romance. The girl hosting the CMT show in her teetery high heels was one of those national talent-search winners they couldn’t have named, young enough she probably thought having to work on New Year’s Eve was awesome. Cub had declared that women who hadn’t had children weren’t really sexy, they looked like dresses on a hanger waiting to get a body in them. Dellarobia was touched. One thing about Cub, you knew he wasn’t faking a compliment. He could also declare your new sunglasses reminded him of a frog, with no offense intended. All that entered his mind’s highway went straight onto cruise control. Somewhere between Toby Keith and Kitty Wells they’d both conked out, and a few hours later woke up couch-racked and disoriented, having missed the big event. She dragged herself and Cub to bed feeling achy and sad, hung over without cause. The mood had followed her into this day.

It wasn’t that she envied Dovey’s social life. Felix was already history, she suspected, certainly no impetus for special preparations. Hair was a long-standing recreation between herself and Dovey that allowed them to preen and tuggle each other like beagle pups. “Beauty shop,” they used to call this, with increasing irony in high school, but still rising faithfully to the challenge of curling Dellarobia’s arrow-straight hair and straightening Dovey’s ringlets. Which, in all honesty, struck Dellarobia as part of the same unending march of uselessness that had occurred to her in the dollar store that day, the factory workers and shoppers canceling each other out. So much human effort went into alteration of nonessential components. Especially for women, it could not be denied.

They flipped a coin for the first turn at bat. Dellarobia won, which meant she sat at the mirrored dresser while Dovey clicked on the hot rollers and went to work. She held the metal clips in her mouth and hummed with the radio, classic country, the stuff they’d loved in high school: Patty Loveless on “Long Stretch of Lonesome,” Pam Tillis with “All the Good Ones Are Gone.” Dellarobia wondered how her favorite music got declared “classic” while she was still under thirty. The sight of Dovey with the clips in her mouth made her homesick for her mother, who used to spend afternoons with that same mouth-full-of-pins frown, pinning pattern pieces to a bolt of fabric spread over the dining table. The more expensive the fabric, the deeper the quiet and that frown, lest she make a wrong cut and have to swallow the expense. Dellarobia would pull up a chair and read her library book, A Wrinkle in Time or It’s Me, Margaret or The Name of the Rose, depending on the year. The oak table had been built by her father, a broad, smooth-grained surface underpinning the family endeavors long after he was gone. She missed that too, the table. Where was it?

Unlike her mother, Dovey had no stamina for silence. After a couple of minutes she spit out the clips and tossed them on the vanity. “So what happened to Ovid, Lord of the Dance. When’s he coming back?”

“Next Tuesday.” Dellarobia blushed.

Dovey lifted her eyebrows. “What hour and what minute? Have we got butterflies over Mr. Butterfly?”

“Dr. Butterfly to you.”

“Excuse me? I got him to moonwalk.”

“Because you’re a ho. I totally saw him first.”

“We can share,” Dovey said. “Like we did with Nate Coyle. Remember that?”

“Wow, poor little Nate. Was that sixth?”

“Fifth. I bet he’s in counseling to this day.” With convincing expertise Dovey used a rat-tailed comb to nick out each long strand of tomato-colored hair, raise it high, and spool it down, a process Dellarobia found entertaining to watch without her glasses. Gradually her head grew enlarged by the corona of rollers. From time to time they heard the thump of Cub’s pipe wrench under the house as he made himself useful down there, wrapping the pipes with new insulation tape. The temperature had finally dropped to something close to winter range.