in a ladies’ magazine and yelled for her
daughter to come look. Dellarobia was maybe six at the time and still remembered
the picture of the dellarobia wreath, an amalgam of pine cones and acorns glued
on a Styrofoam core. “Something pretty, even still,” her mother insisted, but
the fall from grace seemed to presage coming events. Her performance to date was
not what the Savior prescribed. Except marrying young, of course. That was the
Lord’s way for a girl with big dreams but no concrete plans, especially if a
baby should be on the way. The baby that never quite was, that she never got to
see, a monster. The preemie nurse said it had strange fine hair all over its
body that was red like hers. Preston and Cordelia when they later arrived were
both blonds, cut from the Turnbow cloth, but that first one that came in its red
pelt of fur was a mean wild thing like her. Roping a pair of dumbstruck
teenagers into a shotgun wedding and then taking off with a laugh, leaving them
stranded. Leaving them trying five years for another baby, just to fill a hole
nobody meant to dig in the first place.
Something in motion caught her eye and yanked her
glance upward. How did it happen, that attention could be wrenched like that by
some small movement? It was practically nothing, a fleck of orange wobbling
above the trees. It crossed overhead and drifted to the left, where the hill
dropped steeply from the trail. She made a face, thinking of redheaded ghosts.
Making things up was beneath her. She set her eyes on the trail, purposefully
not looking up. She was losing the fight against this hill, panting like a
sheep. A poplar beside the trail invited her to stop there a minute. She fit its
smooth bulk between her shoulder blades and cupped her hands to light the
cigarette she’d been craving for half an hour. Inhaled through her nose, counted
to ten, then gave in and looked up again. Without her glasses it took some doing
to get a bead on the thing, but there it still was, drifting in blank air above
the folded terrain: an orange butterfly on a rainy day. Its out-of-place
brashness made her think of the wacked-out sequences in children’s books: Which
of these does not belong? An apple, a banana, a taxicab. A nice farmer, a
married mother of two, a sexy telephone man. She watched the flake of bright
color waver up the hollow while she finished her cigarette and carefully ground
out the butt with her boot. When she walked on, pulling her scarf around her
throat, she kept her eyes glued to the ground. This boy had better be worth it:
there was a thought. Not the sexiest one in the world, either. Possibly a sign
of sense returning.
The last part of the trail was the steepest, as far
as she could recall from her high-school frolics up here. Who could forget that
ankle-bending climb? Rocky and steep and dark . She
had entered the section of woods people called the Christmas Tree Farm, fir
trees planted long ago in some scheme that never panned out. The air suddenly
felt colder. The fir forest had its own spooky weather, as if these looming
conifers held an old grudge, peeved at being passed over. What had she been
thinking, to name that hunting shack for a meeting place? Romance felt as
unreachable now as it did on any average day of toting kids and dredging the
floor of doll babies. She could have made things easy on herself and wrecked her
life in a motel room like a sensible person, but no. Her legs were tired and her
butt ached. She could feel blisters welling on both feet. The boots she’d adored
this morning now seemed idiotic, their slick little heels designed for parading
your hindquarters in jeans, not real walking. She watched her step, considering
what a broken ankle would add to her day. The trail was a cobbled mess of loose
rocks, and it ran straight uphill in spots, so badly rutted she had to grab
saplings to steady herself.
With relief she arrived on a level stretch of
ground carpeted with brown fir needles. But