Dovey reached up to clasp her wrist and gently pull her down onto the seat next to her. Their side-by-side faces in the mirror were like photos in the twin halves of a locket, some long-gone children in a bargain bin of dead people’s jewelry. “This is not turning out to be your day, is it?” Dovey asked.
Dellarobia shrugged.
“Honey, I had no idea.”
“How could you have?”
“Shit. Your telephone guy.”
“Shit. Everybody’s telephone guy.”
Dellarobia wasted too much of a night and all the next morning on a project of self-loathing. She had been two-timed, and probably worse, by the man with whom she was prepared to cheat on her husband. So she’d been nothing special to him, even as an adulterer. To whom could she possibly complain? She had made her peace with that mistake and taken pains to put it behind her. Yet he still had the power to wreck her.
It never wavered, this bleak helplessness she felt when confronting her undignified obsessions. Before Jimmy it was the man at Rural Incorporated, when she was pregnant with Cordie, which she’d told herself was not a true flirtation. He had steel gray hair and a gold wedding band, and a confidential kindness that completely unwound her. Those appointments got her from week to week. He always had a lot more time for her and her Medicaid papers than for the other people waiting outside his office, and Dellarobia hadn’t minded taking it. She never minded. Cub’s old friend Strickland, who lifted weights and ran his own tree-trimming business, kept delivering wood chips for mulching the flower beds she didn’t have, and she’d taken that too, letting pile it up for years behind the barn. New Heights, his business was called, emblematic of a can-do spirit she found hard to resist. Cub never knew. She had never let things go that far. Yet she understood the betrayal was real. She envisioned the internal part of a person that buttressed a faithful marriage, some delicate calcified scaffold like a rib cage, and knew hers to be malformed, probably from the beginning.
All of Dellarobia’s personal turmoil notwithstanding, the second of January must have been a slow news day. At the stroke of noon, while she was putting out bologna sandwiches for the kids, a TV crew showed up at her door.
She flew to answer the knock, leaving Cordie strapped in the high chair and Preston in charge of making sure she took little bites. Dellarobia was startled to see two strangers on her porch: a beautiful woman in perfect makeup and a man with a bald, pointy head and little horn-rimmed glasses. A huge camera sat on the man’s shoulder as if it just lived there, possibly attached somehow to his complicated all-weather coat that had extra pockets and zippers, even on the sleeves. Strangest of all was their vehicle parked in the drive, some sort of Jeep tricked out with oversize tires and a satellite dish.
“Dellarobia, is it?” The pale woman looked her straight in the eye with a shocking force, like a faucet left on. “We’re from News Nine—we were hoping for just a few minutes of your time to talk about the phenomenon on your farm.”
The phenomenon. The man was looking all around the front of the house, as if casing the joint for a break-in.
“I’ve got small children here that I can’t leave unattended.” Dellarobia stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind her. No way was she letting these people into her trashed house. It had been a long day already, and it wasn’t even noon. Whose idea was it to keep kids home from school a full week and more after Christmas? Preston was having a rocket-science day, using toys as projectiles and sofa cushions as the landing pad. Cordelia did something she called “farmer” with the Cheerios, planting the entire box like seeds in the living room carpet while Dellarobia was in the bathroom less than five minutes. She could see her future in that carpet, the endless vacuuming, the grit on the soles of everyone’s feet. Like a beach vacation minus the beach, and the vacation.
“We only need a few minutes of your time,” the woman repeated. “I’m Tina Ultner, this is my associate Ron Rains.” She shook Dellarobia’s hand in her firm grip. Tina Ultner was amazing to look at, a woman with slender everything: face, nose, fingers, wrists. Her hair was the true pale blond that can’t be faked, with matching almost white eyebrows and a candlewax complexion. She was only a few inches taller than Dellarobia, but with those looks she could own the world. Her makeup alone was a miracle, eyeliner applied so perfectly, her wide blue eyes resembled exotic flowers.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” Dellarobia said, “we’re not presentable in here. My kids are eating lunch. I don’t know what to tell you.”
Tina cocked her head to the side. “How old?”
“Five and almost two.”
Tina’s face crumpled into a combination of anguish and high-beam smile. “You’re kidding me! I have been there, let me tell you. Mine are six and nine, and I never thought we’d see the day. Two boys. What are yours?”
“What are they, good question. This morning I’m thinking monkeys, maybe. So you’re telling me there’s life after kindergarten and diapers?”
“There is, I promise. It’s like principal and interest or something. I don’t know why, but at age six they shift from a liability to an asset.”
“Perfect,” Dellarobia said. “That’s when I’ll sell them.”
Tina laughed, a two-note, descending peal like a door chime, a laugh as tidy as the rest of her. “What I mean is, they start following instructions. You can tell them to go get Daddy, and they’ll do it.”
Dellarobia grinned sadly. “And that’s a plus?”
“Oh, I hear you,” Tina said, seeming as if she really might. Was it possible she had done anything as messy as child-rearing with those white-tipped fingernails? Dellarobia was mortified by her baggy T-shirt and naked face in the light of Tina’s glow, but Tina seemed not to notice. She appeared ready to abandon her cameraman friend and run off for coffee and gossip. He must not be that interested in children, was Dellarobia’s hunch.
“Here’s the truth,” she confessed to Tina. “If I let you all see my living room right now, I’d have to kill you. And the kids are alone in there, so they’re probably scheming to drink the Clorox. I just don’t see any way I can help you out.”
“Should we come back another time, when you’re not tied up?”
Dellarobia shrugged. “After their high school graduations?”