Flight Behavior Read Free

you wouldn’t wreck your life for a Jimmy—“the telephone
man” was barely a man. Twenty-two, he’d said, and that was a stretch. He lived
in a mobile home with his mother and spent weekends doing the things that
interested males of that age, mixing beer and chain saws, beer and target
shooting. There was no excuse for going off the deep end over someone who might
or might not legally be buying his own six-packs. She longed for relief from her
crazy wanting. She’d had crushes before, but this one felt life-threatening,
especially while she was lying in bed next to Cub. She’d tried taking a Valium,
one of three or four still rattling in the decade-old prescription bottle they’d
given her back when she lost the first baby. But the pill did nothing, probably
expired, like everything on the premises. A week ago she’d stabbed a needle into
her finger on purpose while mending a hole in Cordie’s pajamas, and watched the
blood jump out of her skin like a dark red eye staring back. The wound still
throbbed. Mortification of the flesh. And none of it stopped her from thinking
of him, speed-dialing him, making plans, driving by where he’d told her he would
be working, just for the sight of him up the pole in his leather harness. A
strange turn of fortune had sent him her way in the first place: a tree that
fell on a windless day, bringing down the phone line directly in front of her
house. She and Cub didn’t have a landline, it wasn’t even her problem, but a
downed line had to be reconnected. “For the folks that are still hanging on by
wires,” Jimmy had told her with a wicked grin, and everything that came next was
nonsensical, like a torrential downpour in a week of predicted sunshine that
floods out the crops and the well-made plans. There is no use blaming the rain
and mud, these are only elements. The disaster is the failed expectation.
    And now here she went risking everything, pointing
her little chin up that hill and walking unarmed into the shoot-out of whatever
was to be. Heartbreak, broken family. Broke, period. What she might do for money
if Cub left her was anyone’s guess. She hadn’t been employed or even exactly a
regular to human conversation since the Feathertown Diner closed, back when she
was pregnant with Preston. Nobody would hire her again as a waitress. They’d
side with Cub, and half the town would claim they’d seen it coming, just because
they thrived on downfalls of any sort . Wild in high school,
that’s how it goes with the pretty ones, early to ripe, early to rot. They would say the same thing she’d heard her mother-in-law tell Cub: that
Dellarobia was a piece of work. As if she were lying in pieces on a table, pins
stuck here and there, half assembled from a Simplicity pattern that was flawed
at the manufacturer’s. Which piece had been left out?
    People would likely line up to give opinions about
that. The part that thinks ahead, for one. A stay-at-home wife with no skills,
throwing sense to the four winds to run after a handsome boy who could not look
after her children. Acting like there was no tomorrow. And yet. The way he
looked at her suggested he’d be willing to bring her golden apples, or the
Mississippi River. The way he closed his fingers in a bracelet around her ankles
and wrists, marveling at her smallness, gave her the dimensions of an expensive
jewel rather than an inconsequential adult. No one had ever listened to her the
way he did. Or looked, touching her hair reverently, trying to name its color:
somewhere between a stop sign and sunset, he said. Something between tomatoes
and a ladybug. And her skin. He called her “Peach . ”
    No one else had ever called her anything. Only the
given name her mother first sounded out for the birth certificate in a doped
anesthetic haze, thinking it came from the Bible. Later her mother remembered
that was wrong; it wasn’t the Bible, she’d heard it at a craft demonstration at
the Women’s Club. She found a picture