Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie’s room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie’s ear Are you very very sad? In all the great wide world Cassie couldn’t imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn’t answered, had just lay there feeling Belle’s breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They’d opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts’ salvation.
Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep. Can you smell the water? Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.
Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?,” and Laura said no, she hadn’t, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn’t. He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn’t eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He’s up.
Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle’s history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.
“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.
“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.
“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.
“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He’d put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman’s, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she’d been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she’d been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.
“Get a some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.
Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she’d been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.
“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”
Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On Where the Lilies Bloom.”
“Aren’t you—Isn’t this summer vacation?”
“I’m just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”
“I see. Good book?”
“I liked it.”
Jimmy nodded. “Well.”
Cassie kicked the chair with the back of her foot until it started to ache.
“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”
She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she’d written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.
“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”
Cassie cleared her throat again—she’d start with the bike chain, she figured—and Laura turned slowly and looked Jimmy up and down, then pulled a pan from the cabinet with a hard rattle and slammed it on the stove.
“And maybe a cheese sandwich.” Jimmy looked at Cassie, grinned, shrinking up his left eye as he did so, his bit of a wink. “Man could starve to death in his own home, huh, Cass?”
Cassie thought she might be called upon to betray her mother, it was not at all out of the question for Jimmy to demand such loyalty, but she was spared the request by a block of cheese sailing from the direction of the refrigerator, not its sailing so much as its landing was the distraction. It skidded underneath Belle’s papers and came to a stop. The three at the table looked up at Laura. Some very bad things had happened this way, some of which could still be discerned on the ceiling.
“I can see I’m not wanted here,” Jimmy said, pushing himself up from the table.
“How dare you,” Laura said, crossing the kitchen like a storm. “How dare you come home after four days—”
“Five,” Cassie said.
“—five days and push me into giving you an excuse to leave again? What in the name of Christ sort of person are you?”
“Mom,” Belle said.
“Shut up, Belle, and you shut up, too, Cassie.”
“I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this in front of my daughters,” Jimmy said, pulling himself up to his full height, an inch shorter than Laura.
“Oh, oh, that’s rich, too, your daughters,” Laura said, getting closer to Jimmy’s face with every word.
“All I came home for was my stick, anyway.” Jimmy turned and walked into the living room, stopping at the coat closet, where he took out his cue case.
Cassie jumped up and ran past him, grabbing her sandals off the porch as she went. She leaped down the porch steps and landed on some sharp rocks, had to make her way down the driveway to where he’d parked, pulled open his passenger door. It was hot inside, it was shocking. Jimmy drove a 1971 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and red leather interior, and if they were starving to death or would die without penicillin and the only way to save them would be to Sell The Car, then good-bye Cassie, good-bye Belle. This according to Laura. Poppy reluctantly agreed.
A