Butterfly Soup. Nancy Pinard

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СКАЧАТЬ arms. Rose dozed, too, in a blissful half sleep, wakened by Valley’s slightest movement. Those were the days. She knew exactly where Valley was every minute.

      Farmland stretches out for miles on either side of the roadway. The fields, usually nappy with soybean plants by the second week in June, are bogs of puddles. Rose wonders if the seeds have rotted in the ground. Her tires zhush through a puddle, throwing water onto the wild grapevine growing over the roadside fence posts. The stench of hen manure from Gabriel’s turkey farm is stronger downwind. The sky arches overhead in a blue dome, its clouds unaffected by the humidity that rises from the swampy earth like bad breath.

      The summer Valley was conceived was different—hot but not humid. The water in Kaiser Lake was silky and warm; the perfume of lilac and honeysuckle hung in the air. Dishes clinked on screen porches around the lake as people lingered late over coffee and dessert, listening to the hiss of locusts. On such a night, Rose thinks, no one should be held responsible for what happened. And though she’d been terrified at the time, Valley was a keeper. If a baby was the punishment for her sin, she should sin more often. It was no wonder she couldn’t confess it.

      Rose sees a woman standing in the road ahead, waving her arms frantically. She knows it’s Helen from the long legs and hair even before she’s close enough to see her features. Rose brakes and pulls up next to her friend. “I thought you’d be at work.”

      “My car’s in the garage, so I’m walking home for lunch. Bethany’s home alone.”

      Rose has never seen Helen eat anything but yogurt, standing at the fridge in the Laundromat office—unless you count the sunflower seeds she bakes to chew on when she can’t smoke. To Rose, yogurt isn’t lunch. Certainly nothing to walk home for. But that’s why Helen has pretty thighs and hers are all mottled.

      “Get in. I’ll drive you. I meant to call you anyway. I may be gone for a few days—on a church retreat—so don’t worry if you can’t reach me.” She’s not really leaving home, but if she admits to secluding herself, Helen will think she’s as crazy as the old woman robbing the church Dumpster.

      Helen plants her tidy hips on the seat. “Oh, too bad. Just when Rob’s arrived. Have you seen him yet? He stopped into the laundry with his stuff for me to wash, and guess what? He recognized me!” Rose glances at her. Helen looks great in the sleeveless black tank she’s wearing with her jeans. At times like this, Rose can’t think what she likes about Helen. They wouldn’t be friends if they hadn’t been sitting together pregnant in Dr. Burns’s office that year. Eleven months after she married Carl, Helen delivered Bethany and left the hospital wearing her jeans—which, at the moment, seems like a pretty good reason to hate her.

      “He said he’d know my hair anywhere,” Helen brags. Her hair really is pretty, but it’s sickening how she relishes every little detail like Joanie Cranford. Helen wastes what little money she has on fancy botanical shampoos so her hair smells of windfall apples one day, ripe peaches the next.

      “He called me Helen Dudley,” Helen prattles on. “Maybe I should have changed my name back when Carl left, but after all those years of being called Milk Dud and Dudley-Do-Wrong, I was glad enough to be rid of it. He hadn’t heard I’d married. He says he remembers the name Slezac, but only the name—he couldn’t put a face to Carl. When you’re not in the same class you don’t really know each other. Anyway, he was sorry to hear about my divorce.”

      “Is he married?” The question comes out in a little half voice, and Rose clears her throat to cover, as if she’s fighting a frog.

      “He didn’t say so.” Helen prides herself on being the first to know the town gossip, and Rose eggs her on with a few more questions. “There’s nobody with him,” Helen says. “No woman, I mean. He’s got some kid along, though.”

      Rose lets that sink in. “What do you mean kid?”

      “Just some boy.” To Helen it’s a toss-off. “You know. Sixteen, maybe.”

      “Oooh, Bethany’s age,” Rose says, filling her voice with innuendo. Really she’s worried that Valley has a half brother. What if he looks like Valley?

      “You don’t really think—” Helen says, though she’s obviously conjuring a romance for Bethany. “Maybe I should invite them over. You know, for a friendly dinner.”

      Rose pictures the TV dinners she’s seen Helen stack neatly in her grocery cart, filing each item as if she’s lining up decimal points after counting the Laundromat’s change. “It might be kind of obvious,” Rose says, but when has Helen ever been afraid of being obvious?

      Helen lights a cigarette and dangles her right hand out the open window. “If I’m not obvious, Bethany won’t get it. I’ve never seen such a backward child. She never brings a soul home with her.”

      “Maybe she needs time alone. Some people do.”

      Rose turns off the main road and pulls over at the end of Helen’s dirt driveway. The tree branches hang so low in Helen’s front yard it’s hard to see the brown bungalow Helen’s grandfather left her. Her sunflowers and zinnias are spiking up already in the one sunny spot in the yard, the planter box over the septic tank. Gopher, Helen’s chocolate Lab, comes bounding out to the car, tail wagging so hard his body wriggles all over.

      Helen gets out of the car, patting Gopher with the hand holding her cigarette. “Flim Flannigan died last night. Did you know?”

      “I knew someone had. He’s suffered so long. And he had to be lonely after Louise died.”

      The dog’s tail beats a knocking rhythm against the car door, and Rose fears dents. She wishes Helen would discipline her dog. Helen bends over to look in the window. “It’s too bad you have to go right now. Rob asked for you.”

      Rose waits anxiously by the window for the deliveryman. She has cleaned the little room off the den that stores miscellaneous items: the boxed-up Mr. Coffee, albums of old photographs, a file box of bank statements and insurance records, a noisy window fan, two antique chairs with broken-out cane seats and three boxes of Christmas decorations. It took ten minutes to move the stuff to one side. Then she hung a picture of Our Lady with a mother-of-pearl rosary draped over the frame and a photo of Valley and herself stuck in its bottom corner.

      The truck turns in, crunching gravel. Two men come to the door carrying the frame and spring between them. She leads them to the storage room and points to the corner where she wants it set up. They hand her the Mary Theresa tag, lay the metal spring between the head and foot frames and screw it together. They make a second trip to the truck and return with a thin mattress. This they lay in place, performing their duties solemnly, as if part of a ritual. Rose wonders where such men come from—men who don’t roll their eyes at a woman’s faith. Such a man would sit beside her in church. He would lead her up to Communion. Pray aloud at the dinner table. She can’t imagine how that would be. It’s not marriage as she knows it. She’s not sure what it is. First Communion practice maybe, at age six. The boys and girls processed up the aisle, and the priest putting Necco wafers on their tongues so they could practice holding the host in their mouths without chewing.

      Rose watches the men leave, then makes the sign of the cross over the bed.

      She looks at the tag. Under Sister Mary Theresa’s name is a quote in cramped handwriting: True love grows by sacrifice, and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction, the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes—St. Theresa, the Little Flower. It’s uncanny—exactly why she bought the bed. It even came with directions, in case she didn’t СКАЧАТЬ