“How old a person are we discussing here?”
“Older than us, but not old. I don’t know, forty?”
“What kind of a grown-up takes off on a regular weekday and pays cash money for an airplane ticket, to look at butterflies?”
“You tell me, Dovey. You think I could make this up? I showed him where the road starts and told him to be my guest, go on up. I’m not about to let Hester get hold of him. She’d probably charge him double as a person of color.”
“Okay, what color? What’s this guy look like?”
“Like, not from around here, right? Six and a half feet tall, skinny as a rail, African American, but not totally. I mean, sort of on the lighter side of that. And the way he talks is unreal. Silky smooth.”
“Shoot, girl! That was Barack Obama.”
Dellarobia laughed. “Maybe. Traveling undercover.”
“But there’d be more Volkswagens in your driveway,” Dovey said. “He’d have his Secret Service guys.”
“That’s true. No Secret Service guys.”
Dovey affected a television voice: “In a scandal of national proportions, the president was seen flirting today with a sexy Tennessee woman wearing pajamas outside the home.”
National proportions, that part struck her as true somehow. “Who says I’m still in my pajamas?”
“The Tennessee temptress, a married mother of two, denies everything.”
“So, guess what else.”
“Believe me, I cannot.”
“He’s coming ba-ack!” Dellarobia sang.
“Well, I should hope so. He’s not going to go live on the mountain.”
“No, I mean here. To our house.” Dellarobia kept an eye on the front porch, but no one was coming or going as yet. “I didn’t even ask Cub first. I just invited this guy flat out to come have supper with us.”
“You are the bomb. You don’t know this guy from Adam, and you, like, acquire him.”
Dovey’s admiration animated her. “I know. It’s crazy, right? He told me he’s staying at the Wayside, and I guess that put me in rescue mode. That’s a scary place, Dovey, you have to admit. Have you been down there lately?”
“You mean, other than when I was looking for some meth or a hooker?”
“Exactly. I mean, the poor guy, traveling all this way, and he winds up there. I told him he could not eat the food at that restaurant. It might be fatal.”
“So you’re cooking for him.”
“Oh, jeez. I’ll have to figure something out. What should I make?”
“I don’t know. That Mexican chicken thing you make with the corn, that’s good.”
“Well, but what if it turns out he’s from Mexico? I think that’s a fake recipe.”
“Another Mexican knocking at your door? I thought you said he was more—”
“Yeah, more black. I think. Kind of. Or, what’s Bob Marley?”
“Okay, now you’re telling me what, he’s got dreadlocks?”
“No. Like Bob Marley’s cute brother that avoided substance abuse and got an education. Oh, shoot, there’s Cub on his way out to work. I’ve gotta go.”
“Are you telling him?”
“You mean Cub? Right now, no. He runs happiest on a short tether. I’ll tell him when he gets home from work.”
Cub had spotted her from the front door and was motioning for her to come in the house. Dellarobia waved back and pointed at the phone. “It’s Dovey,” she yelled. “She’s got a personal emergency. I’ll be there in a jif. Is Cordie in the high chair?”
“Playpen,” he said, tucking in his shirttails as he headed for the truck. “They’ve got gravel deliveries lined up all day. I won’t be back any earlier than five.”
“I’ll personal emergency you,” Dovey hissed.
“Sorry.”
“You’re the one with the international man of mystery coming to supper. Possibly the leader of the free world.”
“Yeah, I better get cracking,” Dellarobia said. “My house looks like the toxic waste dump of the free world.”
“Hey,” Dovey said. “You all are just like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, that old movie. Where the white girl brings home her boyfriend and her parents freak out because he turns out to be Sidney Poitier.”
“Gosh, that rings a bell. Sidney Poitier.” Dellarobia felt deranged, losing familiar names and movie titles. She used to check out movies from the library by the half dozen, along with every book that wasn’t nailed down. The library was just little, a storefront in Feathertown with a permanent sheen of dust, now closed, but it used to gather in people of all types. Old guys paging through maritime picture books, housewives checking out romances and household fix-up guides. As a child she loved watching the different kinds of adults, imparting their hints of the many options. Now she moved only among people related by blood or faith, or else, as at the grocery, mute.
Dovey wouldn’t give up on her theatrical revelation. “You have to have seen Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. They do these, like, Hepburnathons on Turner.”
“With opening titles and ending credits, I bet,” Dellarobia said. “I vaguely remember those.”
“What, you can’t stay awake to the end of a movie?”
Dellarobia inhaled, but no words came. Dovey’s television, like Dovey’s everything, answered only to Dovey. Even as close as they were, how could she really understand a household where information had to be absorbed like shrapnel: movie, sitcom, ultimate wrestling, repeat. Dellarobia turned her face up to the sky, feeling tears, blinking them down. If her unity with Dovey wasn’t real, what did she have?
“I don’t get out much anymore,” she said after a moment.
“Listen, sweet pea, you don’t need to. Sounds like the world is beating a path to your door.”
At ten minutes till six, Dellarobia felt embarrassed by everything in her kitchen. The unbreakable Corelle plates, the cheap unmatched table and chairs, the sheen of snot and applesauce she imagined was still detectable on every surface, despite a day of scrubbing. The washer-dryer combo in the little niche, the laundry piled high behind the flimsy louvered doors. Cub’s NASCAR lunch cooler on the counter where he’d flung it down, and the husband himself for that matter, with his too-long hair and slumped posture and his failure even to see that there was anything to be embarrassed about. Sitting at the table reading the sports page of the Courier, he looked like a “before” picture. But this was it; she’d married him in haste, and this was all the “after” there appeared to be.