“I ought to,” Cub said. He went to the wardrobe and pulled the metal cube of a tape measure from his pocket. The piece was massive, with twin oak doors and an inlaid cornice on top. Probably worth something. Dellarobia wondered what had possessed Hester suddenly to give it away. Anything to impress Bobby Ogle.
“I never really felt like a wife in this room, you know? Much less a newlywed.”
“Well, what did you feel like?” Cub asked.
“I don’t know. Like a kid. I know this sounds weird, but more like a sister.” She laughed. “A really pregnant one.”
“Dang it,” Cub said. “Four inches too long for the truck bed.”
Dellarobia viewed the ceiling. Old houses were supposed to give a warm vibe, but this one was bleak. The large, uncurtained window didn’t help. North facing; maybe that was it. There used to be curtains in here, she was sure. She remembered the print, NFL team logos on a blue ground. Hester must have run across that bolt of fabric when Cub was just little, a Tom Thumb linebacker with big dreams. Strange, that those curtains came down.
“Dad says this thing comes apart,” Cub said, sounding vexed. He ran his hand along the seam between the top of the doors and the cornice. “The base and the top are supposed to be separate pieces. That would sure make this easier to get in the truck.”
Dellarobia rolled off the bed and went to get the desk chair, which she knew to have been the least used piece of furniture in this room. Her early married life had involved nagging her spouse to sit and do his homework. She carried the chair over to the wardrobe and stood on it to examine the cornice, peering between the back of it and the wall. “Get me a Phillips-head,” she commanded lightly. “There’s a long brace up the back that holds it together. We’ll have to pull it out from the wall a little to get at it, so ask Hester for some throw rugs too, so we won’t scratch the floor.”
Cub hitched up his jeans and trudged off, thankful for clear instructions.
Heavy clouds scooted across the sky with disconcerting speed. After Cub and his father loaded the wardrobe in the truck they’d tied a tarp over it, and sure enough, a spittle of freezing rain began hitting the windshield before they got to Mountain Fellowship. On Highway 7 they sat waiting to make the left turn as a long line of cars with their lights on crawled toward them. A funeral, maybe, or just the weather. The turn signal clicked its untiring intentions.
“We shouldn’t have let Bear carry that thing,” Dellarobia said. “I thought he was going to have a heart attack when you all were halfway down the stairs.”
“Nah, he’s tough,” Cub said, resting his forearms on the wheel.
“So you think,” Dellarobia said. She’d seen the man’s face. Straining, neck veins and ligaments bulging. He looked like a tied-up horse in a barn fire.
At length they reached the fellowship hall and drove around back, as per Hester’s instructions, to find Blanchie Bise and two other women inside, sorting donated clothes. They had layette sets arrayed all over the long, steel-legged folding tables, bringing to mind the shower these church matrons had thrown for Dellarobia, way back when. A sort of baby-wedding-come-to-Jesus package, not well attended. Evidently this strategy of welcoming pregnant sinners worked well for the likes of Crystal, but it had soured Dellarobia for life on this fellowship hall, which never failed to stir the same post-traumatic stew of panic and rejection. She stood in the doorway now trying to put those thoughts in their place, after this many years, good grief, while Cub had an overly long discussion with Blanchie down at the other end of the hall. This was one of those days when Dellarobia’s past was tagging her around like a hungry cur. Finally Cub started back toward her, shaking his head. “They want us to take it downtown, to the mission. We can unload the boxes here for sorting, but they don’t want to have to haul that chifforobe twice.”
“Makes sense,” Dellarobia said. “Is there somebody there to help us unload it?”
Cub turned on his heel and headed back to Blanchie, having neglected to ask. Unfortunately, they learned, Beulah Rasberry was down at the storefront running things by herself today. Beulah was no furniture mover, at eighty, with her string-bean arms. Blanchie called her son at Cleary Compressors to drive over on his lunch break to meet them in Feathertown and help unload the cabinet. He could be there in an hour.
“We can just wait here,” Cub said, heading for his truck. Dellarobia slid in on the passenger side in time to watch him relax, letting his head fall back to its angle of repose. The man could not hold on to tension with a baseball glove. Dellarobia flipped open the glove compartment, which was tightly packed with tools, work gloves, napkins, and one squashed paper cup with a straw-impaled plastic lid. Extra pressure was required to get the door to close again and latch. Cub’s breathing slowed to an oceanic hiss. She was envious of her husband’s on-off switch. The prospect of sitting in here for an hour with nothing whatsoever to occupy her, not even a bad magazine, confronted Dellarobia as purely impossible. She checked her phone and found she’d missed a text, probably while they were at Hester’s. It was one of Dovey’s church-sign sightings, she must have sent it on her way to work: FORBIDDEN FRUITS PRODUCE A LOT OF JAMS.
Right, Dellarobia thought. Such as my entire adult life.
She closed her phone and punched Cub. “Let’s go to the Dairy Prince.”
He sat up straight, looking startled. “Really?”
“I’m not suggesting we rob a bank. Just Dairy Prince. We haven’t gone out to eat in over two years.”
“Really?” he asked again.
“Well. I haven’t.” She rolled her eyes toward the glove box. “Let’s go get a milk shake or something. I’ll buy. Come on, take a shot. Your wife’s gone wild.”
Obediently he turned over the engine and slung the truck into gear. On the way to town they passed Dovey’s white duplex, its grounds fully claimed by her brothers’ automotive collection, and drove the length of Feathertown’s mostly dead main street. The Fellowship Mission had had its pick of empty storefronts from which to operate its charities. Dellarobia tried to remember what used to be in the other buildings. A drugstore, a hardware, the diner where she’d worked. The fabric shop, her mother’s mainstay. A little grocery run by a man with one arm who doled out hard candies to kids, probably to make them less afraid of him. Mr. Squire. People went to Walmart now, for all of the above. Even the Dairy Prince looked bombed out, with a square of brown cardboard like an eye patch covering one of the two walk-up windows in front. Cub went to place their order, which was valiant. The freezing rain was picking up. He came back with her milkshake and a burger and fries for himself. Their seductive fatty fragrance filled the cab, making her wish she’d gone a little more crazy here. She swiped his fries one at a time while they watched the windshield pale from blurry to opaque. Rain slammed the roof, isolating them from the world in their metal capsule.