“Shoot,” she said suddenly. “I should have taken names. If those kids are so fired up about the butterflies, we could have signed them up for volunteer work.”
“Good idea!” Ovid looked at her brightly through his yellowed goggles, giving her a thumbs-up. His smile went through her like a hit of nicotine.
“Do you know what? I still could. I got the name of their club president. Zack Verkas. No, Vern Zakas.”
Dr. Byron nodded approval. She could see that his old generosity was still there, but was sometimes being held captive by despair, like a living thing held underwater. Today he seemed in a fine mood, wearing blue rubber gloves and using the pricey steel-toothed blender. Its fierce high buzz ascended in pitch like an eggbeater as the motor accelerated. The lab was noisy in general, which also could account for their having missed the protest. The shaker bath full of test tubes and warm water made a monotonous shush like a rocking chair. And the spinning centrifuge, if it wasn’t perfectly balanced, made a racket like tennis shoes in the dryer. It sat on its own special honeycomb mat so it wouldn’t vibrate itself right off the table.
“I’ll call that boy this afternoon,” she promised, writing his name in tiny letters in a corner of her lab notebook while she still remembered it. “If the environment club wants to save the butterflies, you can give them something to do about it.”
“It sounds like you might be on their enemy list now,” Pete said. “Do you think you can get this guy to name names?” Pete was extracting the liquid from the test tubes of butterfly-petroleum-ether soup. He ran them through the centrifuge in batches, then carefully drew out each liquid sample with a pipette and squirted it into its own tiny aluminum pie pan. The pipette resembled the device Hester used for decorating cakes, though obviously it was more precise, and required countless disposable plastic tips, one for each sample. They went through a world of little dishes in this lab. Yesterday she had numbered all the aluminum pans, using an empty ballpoint pen to emboss the thin metal. Her handwriting was all over this place already. Today she was supposed to weigh each sample and record the weights in the lab book. The pans were already stacking up, thanks to her tardiness, so she got busy.
“Oh, he’ll give me names, he owes me,” she told Pete. Some of the tension that had flared between them during the interview had lingered, not as strong as the ether but still in the air. She was not Pete’s equal, obviously; she got that. She was trying to learn the boundaries. “He was horrified about protesting at the wrong address. You should have seen them. They just picked up their signs, apologized for the mixup, and headed over to yell at Hester and Bear. They even picked up their trash.”
“Kids around here are so polite,” Pete said, handing her the little pans one by one. She weighed each one and carried it over to the slide warmer, a long hot-plate affair with a thermometer taped to its side. They’d promised her it did not get hot enough to detonate the place. Needless to say, she passed her workdays now without smoking, having hit on the best ever strategy for quitting: fear of being blown to smithereens.
“It’s true,” Ovid agreed. “These kids don’t sound like the cheeky youngsters we see at Devary.”
She turned up the fan on the venting hood and adjusted the little pans evenly on the warm surface, like pancakes covering a griddle. After all the liquid evaporated she would weigh each pan again, and that was the fat content of a butterfly. It made her a little sad to think of all those dead ladies leaving behind their fat as a matter of public record. World’s Biggest Losers, for real.
“What are kids at Devary like, Bart Simpson?” she asked.
“Unfortunately less entertaining,” Ovid said. “I get e-mails from students informing me of the GPA required to maintain their fraternity status, or what have you, and advising me of how I am to contribute. They cc their parents.”
“This girl in my ecology class last year . . . ,” Pete said, pausing in his work, tilting his pipette sideways and leaning on the counter to face Dellarobia. She could see he was making an effort and appreciated that. “Okay,” he said, “true story. She bragged on Facebook about cheating on the midterm. Another student tipped me off, so I busted her, and she was furious. She filed a complaint saying I’d invaded her privacy.”
“Wow,” Dellarobia said. “We may not have much around here, but manners we’ve got. Some of the kids living down this road might steal your lawn mower out of your garage to buy Oxycontin, but they’d leave a note, you know? ‘Thank you ma’am. I apologize. Please hold me in your prayers.’ ”
Ovid and Pete both laughed, but she wasn’t kidding. Somewhere along the way between mud pies and sex ed, most kids of her acquaintance lost all courage on their own behalf. Even Preston, inventive as he was, was so serious already about not breaking rules. What would become of him when he had to fight for a place in the world against kids who thought they owned it already? Cordelia might manage; she was born defiant, as Dellarobia once had been. But that had won no favors in the long run either, it seemed. Certainly not with the powers that ruled her life, namely her in-laws.
She wondered whether those environment-club kids would have the nerve for this work. Saving butterflies seemed to kill butterflies like mad. They put them in the freezer alive and drew them out dead. Dr. Byron swore the end was quick and painless. He’d finished Tissuemizing and moved on now to the dissecting microscope, where he was splitting open a batch of females to see what they had going on inside. He wanted to see if they were in what he called diapause, the winter slowdown of normal migrating monarchs. He motioned her over now, pulling out a chair next to his.
“Look at this,” he said, waiting while she removed her cumbersome goggles to look in the scope. The goggles left a raccoon ring around her eyes, of which she felt conscious now. “Do you see that?” he asked.
“What am I looking for?”
“Little white pellets. Those are spermatophores, one from each male that mated with her. The little sac is called the bursa, where she stores them.”
“I do see,” Dellarobia said, determined not to blush. The little lady had been around.
“That’s the first one I’ve found that was mated, in more than two dozen dissections. Nearly all of them are in diapause.”
She was close enough to Ovid to smell his aftershave, despite the general ambience of explosive reagents. Since the day she started working in close proximity, the sight of him in his white coat had stirred her unexpectedly. That crisp collar against his dark skin, some kind of wash-and-wear fabric. He was becoming his earlier self. They’d had a crisis, midweek, and he was wonderful about it. The power went off, leaving them in darkness with all those churning machines coasting to a halt, and she’d called in the outage only to learn the problem was her bill. They’d been so stretched after Christmas, so many bills coming in at once, she’d assumed the power company would give them a month’s grace. Having forgotten grace was already on the table since November, carved down to the bones. The humiliation of telling Pete and Ovid could have been the worst day of her life, but he was overly kind, insisting it was his mistake, he’d overlooked all the current these machines would be drawing off the same meter as the house. He’d sat next to her with his personal credit card while she went through the power company’s phone menu in tears, trying to get through to some real person and explain there was more at stake here than just some family in the dark.