Butterfly Soup. Nancy Pinard

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СКАЧАТЬ rummages in her purse. She finds the plastic grain of her checkbook. Thanks to Rob’s appearance this morning, she knows just how much she has.

      “Thirty,” says the woman in red Keds.

      The auctioneer looks left. “Will you go thirty-five?”

      Rose raises her hand high before the Notre Dame woman can answer, recalling the details of a bedtime story her mother read to her often—a story about St. Clare protecting herself and her convent by holding the blessed host before a band of marauding soldiers.

      The auctioneer asks for forty. Notre Dame raises her hand.

      Rose looks at the woman to get some idea how high she might go. Her jeans are clean but frayed. Her hair is flat against her head. She is not the beauty-parlor kind.

      “Fifty,” Rose says defiantly.

      The auctioneer turns right. “Will you go sixty?” Red Keds bows her head. Left. Notre Dame turns away. Rose has won. She puts her groceries down and fishes for her checkbook.

      “Going once. Going twice. Sold to the lady in the flowered dress for fifty dollars,” the auctioneer proclaims. “God bless you, dear.”

      Rose smiles at him. He is not a priest, but it will have to do.

      CHAPTER 2

       S ince last Thursday when the doctor named his intermittent symptoms multiple sclerosis, Everett dreads morning. Not the whole morning, just that moment when daylight jolts him from his dreams, as if he’s been cruising down the freeway in his Ford Fairlane—Rosie at his side and Valley, frozen in his mind at age eleven, prattling away in the back-seat—when the car slams into a tree. His stomach flies forward; his body remains belted to the car.

      Everett closes his eyes, tries to meld with the warm water in the new mattress and opens his eyes a second time. His vision is fine, today at least. The edges of the room, where walls meet ceiling, are clear, not fuzzy. The wallpaper’s red and white stripes are as distinct as prison bars. He wiggles his toes and taps his fingers on the mattress, then flexes his knees and elbows. The mattress ripples beneath him. He reaches for Rosie.

      Instead of her usual sleeping form—sprawled on her stomach, left hand beside her cheek—he finds a pillow. He smiles in spite of her absence. He loves her soft breasts, the curve of her hips, how her skin springs back to his touch like yeasty dough. She’s all woman, not a skinny stick like Helen—always working out and picking at her food as if it’s poison. But Rose isn’t strong like Helen, either. When he can no longer walk, how will she wrestle him out of the bathtub, into a wheelchair? He likes being the caretaker. Carrier of suitcases and heavy grocery bags. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

      The worst part is not knowing what will happen. Or when. He was fine two days ago, before he knew his episodes had a name—and a deteriorating prognosis. Now he feels like a goddamn time bomb. In his mind’s eye, a lighted fuse snakes across the quilt connected to bundled sticks of dynamite. He’s got to snuff that fuse. Somehow.

      He hasn’t told Rosie. The thought of her expression, eyes soft and vulnerable, brows lifted, makes his stomach turn over. But he can’t keep it secret forever. Maybe it’s best to just tell her—to get it over with.

      He hears her feet pad along the hall carpet and into the room. He senses her closeness, smells her breath as she peers over the quilt. He pretends to be sleeping, but when she gets close enough he grips the tie on her robe. The front comes loose as he tugs. “Not now, Everett,” she says in her daytime voice. “We have to talk.” When she flattens her robe to her chest, her nipples protrude through the pink cotton. He’d like to push them like buttons, but then she’d know he can see them. Even at night she wants the lights out. Can she really be so modest after all this time? Or does she just think she’s supposed to be?

      “Were you awake when Valley came in last night?” she asks.

      He tells her he got up at one.

      “Her mascara’s streaked all down her face. I knew that boy was no good.”

      There she goes again, jumping to conclusions. Everett tries to distract her, reaching under her arm to knead her breast, but she’s not falling for it. When he won’t jump on her worry wagon, she flounces off. Everett imagines himself slipping her robe down off her shoulders, watching it fall to the floor as she dances in the morning light. He rocks the bed to the slinky music in his head, tightening and loosening his hips.

      It will never happen. The bed settles.

      Until Thursday he’d told himself her modesty was fine. It brought back the feeling of the first time, kept her always new. Maybe she knows that. Maybe her shyness is just an act. His groin stirs. Nah. Rosie isn’t clever. She is Rosie of the White Sheets. A goddamn Catholic saint. She doesn’t know that time is running out. By next week she may not want him at all, even in the darkness. He’s got to tell her.

      Everett rolls back onto his side and pushes himself up. So far so good. Nothing is numb, though so far he hasn’t wakened to numbness. Reading a pamphlet shouldn’t make symptoms appear, but since reading it, he’s tracking every twinge. His legs hold when he hoists himself onto them—not like last Tuesday, when his right leg buckled suddenly and he fell from the fourth rung of the ladder. He’d chalked up his bruises to the hazards of work when Rosie had asked. But it wasn’t the first time he’d fallen without cause.

      He listens to the water run through the pipes as she turns the taps on and off. The silence means she’s dressing. “Rosie?” No answer. He raises his voice. “Rosie?” Silence. His speech may go someday. He’ll blabber, and people will think he’s retarded and avert their eyes. No one will hire a retarded electrical contractor. “Rooo-ssieee!”

      “I have to run to the store, Everett,” Rosie says, emerging from the bathroom fully clothed and wriggling her bare feet into heeled pumps. “We’re out of cream.”

      “Wait.” She’s halfway down the stairs before he formulates what it is he really wants. “I thought we might go somewhere today. You know, take a little day trip. Spend some time together.” Her shoes tap on the kitchen tile and the door shuts behind her.

      Okay, he thinks. If that’s the way you want it. See if I’m here when you need me. He pulls on boxers, shorts and a polo and ties his sneakers, plotting to exit before she returns.

      In the bathroom Everett pushes the clutter of Valley’s makeup aside. He wipes her blond hairs from the vanity with a damp sponge and wonders at the irritation he feels. Maybe Rosie is right. Maybe feeding, clothing and sheltering a daughter isn’t all there is to fathering. But Rose doesn’t know what it’s like to be him. He’s never admitted it to anyone, but from day one he and Valley were off-kilter. In the hospital he had looked at the wrinkled, slimy infant Rosie held, seen the adoration in her eyes, the protective curve of her shoulders, and felt like a stranger. He’d chalked it up to Valley’s early arrival. He and Rosie hardly knew one another when Valley turned up. Rosie’s growing belly had seemed a pleasant pacifier that compensated for her disappearing figure. The pregnancy slowed Rosie down after the agitation of their courtship. She’d laid quietly on the couch many evenings with her head in his lap, loaning his hands her nightgowned breasts and belly, a drowsy smile on her face. He’d led her off to bed easily after that, and she’d folded herself around him, accepting his attentions to the end. Then Valley arrived and he got lost in the chaos of feedings and diapers and crying in the night. Rosie’s breasts weren’t his after that. None of her was.

      Now СКАЧАТЬ