In her driveway now were her father’s Caddy and her sister’s VW bug. When she saw Mrs. Katt, the neighbor, walk up to the porch, she began to panic. Mrs. Katt would show up at any moment of despair with a can of Folgers, and she’d scrub your kitchen while you convalesced with your family in another room. You’d sit in your pajamas, you’d play rummy, waiting for some news or some fever to break, and become somewhat eased by the heavy scent of cinnamon as Mrs. Katt heated an offering in the stove. Tuesday had a cupboard full of Mrs. Katt’s plates and tureens she needed to return, all with the woman’s name on a piece of masking tape on the bottom.
Tuesday quit worrying when she heard the loud discord of the out-of-tune piano as somebody tumbled their fingers across the keys. Hud was the only one who ever played the piano, which had been shoved onto the screened-in back porch, and she began to hear his voice rising above the whir of the broken air conditioner. She didn’t want to be, but she was glad to hear him singing in her house. She thought of one beautiful song Hud had played for her on the piano on a wet October night. As the rain tip-tipped against the screens, she rocked a sleeping Nina in the old chair they’d had since their first apartment. The joints of the rocking chair squeaked and quivered, and Hud sang softly a song he made up on the spot, about what it felt like to dream at night about a girl like Tuesday.
Pressing her forehead against the screen of the porch door, Tuesday watched Hud entertain her father and the Widow and her older sister, Rose, named for the shock of her father’s red hair she’d been born with, and Mrs. Katt. They all stood or sat sipping coffee from Tuesday’s best cups, swaying to Hud’s song, which seemed to be about a brokenhearted father putting his children to bed. Rose and Red sat in the nearly wrecked wicker chairs, small plates of Mrs. Katt’s crumb cake balanced on their knees. Everyone’s eyes were on Nina, who did an interpretive dance in the middle of the small room, just behind the piano bench. Nina linked her fingers above her head, closed her eyes, and turned on the ball of one foot in an approximation of a pirouette. She then quickly and awkwardly moved into a jazz singer’s slo-mo hip shimmy and snaked her arms around in front of herself. Nina’s dancing was silly and pretty all at once, and Tuesday closed her eyes, mesmerized by her daughter.
Then Nina screamed, startled out of her hypnotic dance by the sight of Tuesday’s dark shadow at the screen. Nina stood there, both hands tight at her mouth. Hud stopped playing, and everyone looked, alarmed, toward the door.
“Mommy!” Nina said when she realized it was only Tuesday. She ran to the screen and opened it, then hugged Tuesday’s legs. “Oh, you won’t believe what happened,” Nina said, speaking in a rush. “It’s not Daddy’s fault, really it’s not,” she said. “Really it’s not. The car. It’s the car’s fault. The car just up and took a shit on him.”
Tuesday finger-thumped the top of Nina’s head. “You know I don’t want you talking like that,” she said. She looked around the room as everyone avoided her eyes. They looked into their coffee cups, or out the windows of the porch, suddenly embarrassed for having enjoyed Hud’s company. Hud just sat hunched at the piano, pushing down slowly on this key, then that, making no music. Rose pinched at a run in the ankle of her stocking. Stockings, thought Tuesday. Now, how about that. Practically crack-of-dawn Saturday morning and there she sits in pricey shoes and her best light-yellow summer dress. Rose always did have a thing for Hud. Tuesday could smell the stench of Rose’s perfume, some designer knockoff she ordered by the vat on the Internet.
“Honeycomb,” Tuesday said to Nina, bending over to kiss the top of her head, “would you go to your room and wait for Mommy? I’ll be in in a minute to tell you how much you worried me.”
“OK,” Nina said, walking away with her head lowered.
“So how’d everyone hear about Hud’s little party this morning?” Tuesday said. “His little party here in my house?”
“We were up at the flea market,” the Widow said. “People said your hair was a mess and you were looking for Nina.”
“Don’t make a federal case, Day,” Rose said, sharing a smirk with Hud and crossing her legs. “Everything’s fine.”
“You stink,” Tuesday said, feeling mean toward everyone there. “Where the hell did you get that cologne? Truck stop?”
“Oh, girls,” Red said. “Let’s be sweet.”
Rose laughed through her nose, rolled her eyes. “Shows you how much you know,” she said. “It’s Shoot the Moon you’re smelling.”
“Oh, is that what that is?” the Widow said, clearly impressed. “I thought maybe that’s what.”
“Got it at Marshall Field’s that last time in Chicago,” Rose told the Widow, uncrossing her legs, then recrossing them. “I’ll get you some the next time I go back.”
“Oh, honey, I’d kiss you all over,” the Widow said.
Rose would never have paid the $100 a bottle for Shoot the Moon, Tuesday knew. She probably just tore an ad from a fashion magazine and rubbed the scented page against her throat in the car on the way over.
When Hud began tapping out “Chopsticks” on the piano, Tuesday reached over to slam down the lid over the keys. Hud snapped his hands back just in time and jumped at the loud noise of the fallen lid. “Damn, Day,” he said, looking up at her with that baffled, what-the-hell-did-I-ever-do-to-you? look he’d mastered years before. With that look, so carefully maneuvered he must have practiced in a mirror, he always effectively made Tuesday feel like the biggest bitch that’d ever walked upright. In his lovely blue eyes, with that look, were kindness and a boy’s gentle confusion. Gatling had inherited Hud’s counterfeit innocence, had started working that same look way too young.
“One of these days I’ll run away with her myself,” Tuesday said, remembering the peach in her pocket. She pulled it out and pressed at a soft part of the fruit, trying to keep from crying again. “I’ll drop a match on this whole house of sticks as I leave. You’ll lose everything. The piano, your songbooks, all the crap you left behind. And we’ll be nowhere to be found.”
“You were just inches from setting the place on fire last night,” Hud said, whispering just loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear. “You had fallen asleep with a cigarette still smoking, burning a hole in the sofa. Who knows how big a fire you would’ve made if I hadn’t shown up? I, for one, don’t particularly want a little burn victim for a little girl.”
“Cigarettes,” the Widow Bosanko said, sighing, shaking her head. Mr. Bosanko had died of lung cancer.
Tuesday put the peach back in her pocket and left the room. She didn’t feel on the verge of tears anymore. Hud always took an argument just one step too far. He could so easily have her in the palm of his hand, right there along with Rose and the Widow, but then he’d say something too godawful. If he’d just left it at “Who knows how big a fire . . .” But then he had to turn Nina into a burn victim, erasing away all her darling features, her tiny, perfect nose and soft lashes and those lips of pale, pale pink.
In the bathroom she took off her dress and leaned her head over the side of the tub to rinse out her stiff hair. When she turned the water off, she heard that Hud had gone back to performing the rest of his song. Tuesday wrapped her wet head in a towel, stepping into the hallway wearing only the matching silk bra and underwear patterned with blue bunnies that Rose had given her last Christmas.
After pulling on a short tartan skirt and a t-shirt and grabbing her face-painting kit, Tuesday went to Nina’s room. Nina sat on the bed dressing her paper doll in a paper ball gown, and Tuesday sat beside her. She touched the fringe of Nina’s faux-leather vest. “You can wear this today too if you want,” Tuesday said.
“Good,” Nina said.
“Don’t