“We’re going to put down stakes right here,” she said to Mireille.
That night Mireille slept.
She was used to a house where people made noises at all hours. Her father getting drinks for guests, her brother staring at them over the banister and getting reprimanded, her mother puttering in the laundry room, opening the door to check on her, the top-heavy house creaking as the inhabitants shifted their weight. Here her mother lay down when it got dark and clasped her hard to her side. There was nothing that could move in that wind-struck shack. It had done all its settling long ago. There were floorboards that creaked, but nobody to step on them. The only sound was the rushing of pine needles on the trees filtering the dusty air. The pollen was so thick the car was dusted canary yellow the next morning. The humidity, when the temperature got up in the afternoon, was an invisible weight bearing a person to the ground. Mireille slept again.
By the second morning, she was no longer an irritable child. She peeled herself off Peggy and looked around for something to play with.
Peggy did not pay visits to her parents of her own accord, but this was a special case. In general they alternated holidays so as not to miss any relatives: Easter here, Fourth of July there, and so forth. Invariably they ate with Peggy’s parents on Thanksgiving because Lee’s mother didn’t cook. Then everybody came to Lee’s parents’ for Christmas. They had maids making eggnog on rotation and a two-story tree in the front hall with a Lionel train around it, and the kids idolized them. Peggy’s parents, on the other hand, thought she spoiled the kids beyond belief. Her mother had knelt on the rug next to Byrdie, holding his new NERF ball behind her back, and said, “Now, I know you’re not used to hearing the word ‘no,’ but I don’t want to play ball right now. I want us to play Go Fish with your sister. Can you do that one little thing for someone else?” Family get-togethers involving the Vaillaincourts were tense, stubborn confrontations about child-rearing practices, seething under a facade of ritualized gentility and studiously avoided by everyone.
Thus Peggy believed that while Lee might set the wheels of justice turning, he would hesitate for days before calling her parents. Yet it was summer vacation, and they would be calling Stillwater to see when she was bringing the kids to swim in the pool. She decided to drive up and preempt them.
She knew where the key was hidden, but she rang the doorbell. “My, my!” her mother said. “Aren’t you tan!” She let her in, looking her up and down. “You’ve been playing tennis again!”
Peggy laughed. “No, Mom, I’ve been gardening.”
“I would know if you’d been gardening,” her mother said. “The back of your neck would be red and wrinkled as a turkey. No, you’ve been playing tennis. At your age you should be riding or playing golf. Something you can wear a hat and gloves at.”
“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” Peggy’s father said. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”
“Let me get Mickey,” she said, turning back toward the car. “I didn’t know if you were home.”
“Where’s Byrdie?”
“School,” Peggy said. “What a great kid.”
“He’s a little spoiled, but he’s a fine boy,” her father agreed.
“How’s Lee?” her mother asked.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Lee’s not—as a matter of fact Lee and I are not getting along. We separated.”
“You’re not living with Lee?” Her mother drew back in dismay.
“I’ve got my own place. Be honest, Mom. Lee Fleming! How long was that going to work?”
Her father chortled.
“Well, is he fine with it?”
Peggy sighed. “Sure. He has a new girlfriend.”
Her father guffawed.
“Are you getting a divorce?” her mother asked.
“Not so far.”
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“I’m not getting a divorce, so why would I need a lawyer?”
“Lee’s out there right now, deceiving you with some two-bit hustler,” her mother said earnestly. “I don’t remember you signing any premarital agreement. He’s going to have to settle something on you. We’ll force him.”
“You and what army? I’m telling you, I cut out of there with no forwarding address. If I go to a judge, Lee will get custody of Mickey, too, not just Byrdie. I couldn’t make Byrdie come along. He didn’t want to, not with a choice between me and the Playboy of the Western World. Now name me a judge Lee’s not related to. I wouldn’t touch a court of law with a ten-foot pole. Screw me over, fuck you. Screw me twice—”
“Watch your language, young lady!” her father interrupted.
“Anyhow, he’s broke. He won’t have a cent until his mom buys the farm, and that’s going to take forty years. If she dies first, his dad marries some deb and we never see a cent.”
Peggy’s mother took Mickey by the hand and stood in the archway to the dining room, making as though to take her someplace else to play, but not wanting to miss anything. “Let’s play boats,” Mickey said.
“I don’t have boats. I guess you don’t have boats anymore either, now that you don’t live on Stillwater Lake.”
“Mommy made the lake fall down. Now we play boats in the yard.”
“Where are you living, honey?”
“We got a pyramid, and blue butterflies!”
“Where do you live?” Peggy’s father said, addressing himself to Peggy.
“Rented house,” Peggy said. “Nothing special.”
“Where?”
“I’d rather not say. I don’t want Lee serving me with papers.”
“I’m concerned about you, honey.”
“I can make my own decisions.”
Her father laughed. “I noticed! Do you have a phone, where we can call you?”
“Not in the house. There’s a party line at a bait shop.”
“You should get a phone for safety. Just list it under a fake name.”
Peggy stopped off at her dad’s churchyard to let Mickey play. The church was one of the oldest in the country, nearly square, with gated pews shining pale green and the Ten Commandments in loopy gold script on alabaster tablets at the front. Austere, creaky, ancient. She picked up a bench and let it fall. The echo ricocheted off the walls and made Mickey jump. They walked around the outside, stroking the soft salmon brickwork with its tracery of lime and the dark pottery of the glazed headers. In the graveyard a solitary angel kept watch over a boxwood. Broken columns—the oldest graves. The next era, bas-relief willows and skulls. Then cast-iron crosses. Then the newest graves, granite monoliths. The names were always the same. Except for one. The cemetery had apparently been integrated. A cluster of mauve plastic roses poked up from the foot of a tiny mound. At the head was a temporary marker, a cross made of unfinished pine, already weathered, reading karen brown 1970–73.
Peggy remembered the Browns. A nice black family who lived on the school property like her parents. Not neighbors exactly, but close by. And here they had lost a child like Mickey. A child who ought to be older than Mickey, but would always be younger. How sad. She looked at her daughter, and then she did something terrible. She drove to the courthouse, to the county registrar, whom she knew, and said, “Morning, Lester!”
“Miss Peggy! How do you do?”
“Fine, thanks. It’s beautiful out! My dad asked me to come down here. He’s doing Leon Brown’s