She squinted to read the small print on what seemed to be a documentary about lions. It was hard to tell what you were really getting. And it was $12.50. For a previously viewed video, that was outrageous. Their cart remained empty as they rounded the corner into the toy aisle. Cub picked up a boxing robot game, registered the $20 sticker, and put it back. Then he picked out a large $5 affair that looked to be some combination of automatic weapon and chain saw.
“Every redneck child’s dream!” she carped, eliciting a tight, warning look she rarely saw from Cub. She should rein herself in, she knew that. The eruption of loathing came out of nowhere. It scared her. Who was she, anyway? A girl who got knocked up in high school and scurried under the first roof that looked like it might shed water. Now attempting to hang out with a higher-class crowd, getting above her station.
“Ho-ho-ho, you two! Santa’s little helpers?”
They looked up to see Blanchie Bise from church. Dellarobia gestured at their empty cart. “Not much help, are we?”
“I saw you were in the papers again, Dellarobia,” Blanchie said, tugging at her tightly belted raincoat. Everything she ever wore was sized for a previous Blanchie, before creeping weight gain took its toll. Dellarobia thought of it as the Wardrobe of Denial. Blanchie glanced anxiously from wife to husband, when neither of them responded about the newspaper article. “Well!” she piped. “What do you think of this weather? Should we start building an ark?”
Their argument hung suspended, like a movie on pause. Blanchie got the message and scurried along.
“I’m sorry if we’re raising redneck children on a redneck paycheck,” Cub said, in almost a growl. “At least I’m working.”
“Oh, and I’m not.”
He didn’t answer.
“You try running after those kids for a day, then. You’d be flat on your back.”
“I babysat them Friday. While you went running after those fancy-pants kids.”
“For one day, Cub. Not even a whole day. And you were flat on your back.”
“I watched them, didn’t I?”
“Is that what you call it? They’d emptied out the whole refrigerator onto the kitchen floor when I got back. Preston was trying to put a peanut butter jar in the microwave and Cordie was walking around with a ten-pound load in her pants. You were on the couch watching 1000 Ways to Die, as I recall.”
“When are you going to potty-train her, anyway?”
When am I going to potty-train her, mouthed Dellarobia, to the imaginary audience of her soap opera. Maybe not entirely imaginary. One of the yellow-aproned checkout ladies was pretty much following their every move. “She’s not even two yet,” Dellarobia hissed. “And what’s this about fancy-pants kids? Those students are living at the Wayside.”
“Slumming it for a vacation. They’ll go home at Christmas and tell their friends all about it.”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was aware that could be true. She felt herself looking at things through their eyes sometimes. A lot of times, in fact. Their days here were like channel-surfing the Hillbilly Network: the potholed roads, the Wayside, the sketchy diner, her tacky house. She herself was a fixture in their reality show, Redneck Survivor. It had altered her sense of things, even in this familiar store where she was examining her purchases with some new regard. As if she could go elsewhere.
“You don’t know what?” Cub asked.
“I don’t know what those kids are going home to. So don’t act like you do.”
“Whatever. You’re the big shot.” He rolled his eyes toward the end of the aisle where they’d met Blanchie.
“What, because everybody saw I was in the newspaper? You bragged about that, Cub. You were ready to sign autographs at work for having a famous wife.”
He pretended to study an array of identical dolls dressed in different gauzy costumes. “I didn’t think it would turn into a full-time job,” he murmured.
She blew out through her nose, nostrils flared, feeling like a horse. “I didn’t even want to talk to them the second time. I told you that. I said they needed to interview Dr. Byron, but he was gone up the mountain. I only talked to them for about fifteen seconds. I just posed for that picture so they’d go away.” Also, the first one they’d taken was hideous. She was hoping to expunge it from the record.
Spider-Man socks, $3. Spider-Man underwear three-pack, $5.50. Preston needed both, but did underwear count as a Christmas gift? Cub kept saying he wanted the kids to have a “real Christmas,” but she felt off balance, wondering what those words could possibly mean. “Oh, and let me tell you, Cordie was screaming the whole time, with those reporters. Just like the first time. I don’t think she cares for publicity.”
“Not like her mother.”
“Will you quit being stupid!”
A shopper at the end of the aisle looked up. Dellarobia dropped her voice. “You started this, Cub. Announcing it in church. I didn’t even say half the stuff in that article, about the butterflies being on holy ground and everything. That’s your doing.”
“I felt the Spirit, Dellarobia. Something you don’t understand, I guess.”
His sincerity was untouchable, she knew that. Not just in church, everywhere. He’d even offered Ovid a place for his camper. For whatever else he was or wasn’t, Cub bore a plain, untarnished humanity. The fact of that now only cut her anger with more self-hatred. She found herself unable to give in. “I was there last Sunday, and you weren’t, thank you very much.”
She’d had to go it alone with Hester, bearing up under the stares. As a spiritual celebrity she was expected to shine with the Beacons, not slink off for coffee and carbs. The beatitude of Feathertown’s miracle had its perks, but some seemed to think Dellarobia was parading herself, and Hester was profiteering. Others weren’t keen on the outsiders, Ovid Byron and certain unspoken things he might represent. All this of course was filtered through a couple of screen doors before she heard it, but she could imagine. And she was still trying to figure Hester, whom she’d now seen buckle under three times: first in church under the wide gaze of Pastor Ogle, and again when she got so nervous about his impending visit. And third, when she cried and asked for help in Dellarobia’s kitchen. No, four times: up on the mountain when she declared Dellarobia was receiving the spirit. Hester was frightened of something, and she was starting to think it might be God. Church was getting too complicated for comfort.