“What a jackass,” Haley said but she was clearly delighted. She cupped her hands around her mouth and hooted. “Do you tango? Lambada? Do you know the forbidden dance of love?”
Hugh dipped the Santa Claus, pressed his lips into its beard.
“I’m a fool for you,” he said, beaming. He swung his gaze toward the porch, saw Katie standing there. His smile, she thought, flickered. Then he bugged his eyes in a comical way and clapped a hand over his mouth. “Katie, please. I didn’t mean for you to see this.”
“Busted,” Haley said.
Hugh dropped to his knees and spread his arms and bumbled toward her over the grass. The grass glittered with moonlight and frost. Katie said, “You’ll stain your pants,” but Hugh kept coming. In his eyes, she saw passable imitations of penitence and love, and she felt a rush of affection for her husband. He’d pledged himself to her forever. He’d been that brave once, that hopeful. “Please,” he was saying. “Please, Katie. Give me another chance, Katie. I love you, Katie.” He repeated her name like a password, like a charm. “Don’t leave me, Katie. Think of everything we’ve been through, Katie. Think of everything we’ve shared.”
Paul and Haley were in stitches. Hugh flung himself down, kissed her ankles. She thought about Professor Urqhardt. She thought about Evan and Nicole, sleeping now, she hoped, secure in their bones that the coming year wouldn’t be any different from the last. And it wouldn’t be. She knew that. She wasn’t the sort of woman who left her husband. Besides, who could say that this thing haunting her marriage wasn’t part and parcel of love, no matter how it frightened her? It was cold enough that winter was seeping through her stockings but Hugh’s breath, begging forgiveness, was warm.
Lulu
Twenty minutes before her parents arrived, Lulu strolled over to the window and gazed out at Illumination Meadows, heels together, toes and knees angled out, First Position in ballet. She could see Ike over by his Jeep, the moon at his back so he was pissing on his shadow. She twisted the chain of her cross around her thumb. There were two options open to her as she saw it. She could take the devastated and passionate route, rant and rave at Ike or maybe pitch herself out the window right this instant and plummet to her untimely death. Thereby signifying her disillusionment. For mystery’s sake, her last words could maybe be “Oh, the possum.” Or she could go the way of quiet dignity. No anger. No public tears. She could simply descend the stairs, bid a fond farewell to Myrtle and Mary Lee and the two Neals, then head on out to the Jeep, where, in a quivering but controlled voice, she would tell Ike to drive her home. When he protested, she would persist. She might say, “I love you but I don’t love you anymore,” and he would somehow understand. She would suffer silently for who knew how long (months? years?) but eventually time would blur the pain and she would emerge the stronger for her heartache.
Without Ike pressed against her, the cold was creeping into her hair, under her fingernails. Her teeth were chattering and she couldn’t make them stop. She could almost hear, then, the timid sound of her key in the front door of her mother’s apartment, could almost see relief flooding her parents’ faces, washing over them with such enormous force that everything would be forgiven. It seemed almost simpler just to let herself tip forward and out the window. Except she was only maybe thirty feet from the ground, and how embarrassing would it be if she survived?
Beyond the window, out there, skeleton houses and swaths of clay and moonlit kudzu and broken-up hunks of concrete as far as she could see. One day, someone would come along and finish this house, this neighborhood. Trees would be planted. Dogs would fill the night with their barking. This very room might well sleep a child. She pictured a little girl, couldn’t help it, saw, like a time-elapsed movie shot, mint green paint going on over the walls, a border of stenciled roses, pale curtains breezing at the windows, matching dust ruffle, plenty of pillows on the bed.
Nothing was real, she thought. Everything was a symbol for something else.
Stella
Lulu was asleep on the sofa when they arrived, covered neck to knee with an old afghan. Stella lurched in her direction, stopped herself halfway across the room. The coffee table was littered with crumpled tissues. There was an empty bowl balanced on her stomach; the spoon had fallen on the floor. Tears, Stella thought. Ice cream. My daughter is in pain. In sleep, her face was smooth, her skin unmarked by time. Stella could make out the little girl in her features. Her feet, at the other end of the blanket, were battered-looking, her toe-knuckles swollen from ballet. She looked like a magician’s trick, two separate bodies severed and fused. Boyd cupped his hands over Stella’s shoulders from behind.
“Leave her be,” he said. “We’ll sort it out tomorrow.”
All of a sudden he was in charge again. Stella was too relieved just then to hold anything against him. They went into the kitchen and she put a pot of decaf on. While they waited, Boyd pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table. He sat on the other side.
“It’s strange to think about,” Stella said. “Right now, right this minute, there’s a burglar out there.” What she meant was that the world was a perilous and random place, that life could go sour without warning. A burglar could show up at your door or a man in a sweatsuit could step out in front of your car or you could find yourself in an abandoned housing development with a crazy person. Or love could die. Or not. Or your daughter could know sadness. “He’s probably wearing Professor Urqhardt’s pocket watch,” she said.
Boyd said, “Or Mrs. What’s-her-name’s tiara.”
“I wonder what he’s doing for New Year’s Eve,” Stella said. “Even criminals must get lonely.”
“Particularly at the holidays,” Boyd said.
Stella propped her elbow on the table, her chin upon her fist.
“Do you need to call your date? Or the Marchands? Do you need to tell somebody where you are?”
Boyd shook his head.
“They’ll get along without me.”
And for what seemed like a long time, with their daughter in the next room sleeping off a broken heart, they sat at the table without speaking. Stella closed her eyes, tried to sort out what she was feeling. She thought she should be grateful, sad, angry, something, but it was more complicated than that. What she could feel, what she could be sure of, was memory swimming around behind her eyes, her whole life in there, the whole history of everything she loved.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent, Warren Frazier, and my editor, Elisabeth Schmitz, for endless guidance and hard work. Thanks to early readers Jim McLaughlin, Tom Franklin and Shannon Burke. Thanks to the University of Tennessee and the University of Mississippi; without the time and support provided by those institutions this book could never have been written. Thanks to John Zomchick. Thanks to Barry Hannah. Portions of this book have previously appeared, sometimes in very different forms, in Climbing Cheaha Mountain: Emerging Alabama Writers, Christmas in the South, River City and the Southern Review, and I would like to thank everyone involved with those publications, especially Joe Taylor, Don Noble, Charlotte McCord, Judy Tucker, Kathy Pories, KK Fox, CD Mitchell and Brett Lott. Thanks always, always, always to Jill, for her vision and for her patience, as a reader and a wife. And to my daughters, Mary and Helen—here’s hoping they’ll one day understand why Dad is occasionally so distracted and so strange.
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