“The Marriage Flight,” she read aloud, and skimmed ahead to summarize. “At certain times of the year the nest has winged individuals, both males and perfect females.” She glanced at Preston. “That’s a quote,” she told him, “perfect females. For some unknown reason, one day all the other ants will turn on the winged ones, attacking them mercilessly and driving them out of the colony. They test out their wings for the first time on the so-called marriage flight.” She looked up at Preston again. “It’s an old book. I think nowadays they’d say mating.”
He nodded gravely.
“After mating, the female tears off her wings and crawls in a hole to start her own colony. After rearing a small nucleus of workers, she becomes an egg-laying machine.”
Dovey shuddered. “Sheesh. And they all live happily ever after.”
“How do they tear off their own wings?” Preston asked.
“I don’t know, sweetie. But we’re taking the book home, so we’ll find out.”
“We’re getting this one too? It’s not the same book I showed you before.”
“Let me see that.” The spine was marked Volume 16. “Uh-oh,” Dellarobia said. “There’s a whole series of these, Preston. It’s an encyclopedia.”
“I know, Mama, it has all the animals,” he said. Considerately leaving off the duh.
“I don’t think we can buy all sixteen.” She weighed the options, but sixteen dollars was a lot, for something this outdated. If they could hold out for a computer.
Preston looked at the volume with a longing that made her miserable. How much would she deny him for the sake of something that might not materialize? But he came to grips, as always. “I’ll get the ants, and the Goony Bird,” he pronounced. “Cordie wants the baby elephant one, and lizards. Two each, okay?”
Dellarobia took a deep breath. “Honey, I don’t think they’ll let us break up the set.” This made no sense to Preston, so she tried again. “It’s all sold as one thing. Like, they wouldn’t let you buy the lid of the teapot, and not the teapot.”
“Well, if it’s all one thing, then it costs one dollar,” he reasoned.
Dovey looked at Dellarobia, eyebrows raised.
“Technically you’re right,” Dellarobia said. “It has to be one or the other. I could ask. But I don’t think the store people will see it our way.” Her mood sank at the thought of haggling and pleading. For someone’s thrown-out books.
“He’s the master persuader,” Dovey said. “Let him go ask.”
Dellarobia watched fear overtake her son as he understood this proposition. His razor-straight eyebrows lifted as his eyes met hers, hoping for a bailout.
“Here’s the thing, Preston. If I ask, they’ll say no. I’m nobody here, they won’t do me any favors. But you’re this awesome kid that wants his own encyclopedia, right? You totally have a shot.” She backed up her cart to look down the length of an aisle to the checkout registers. There were two cashiers, a heavyset kid with tattoos covering his arms, and an older lady with a ponytail. “Come here,” she said. She stood behind him with her wrists crossed over his chest. “Which one, you think?”
He picked the tattoo kid, no surprise there. In Preston’s world, grandma types were not automatically on your side. Dellarobia told him to gather up as much of the set as he could carry, and go make his argument. She and Dovey watched him make the long walk down the towering book aisle, like a prison inmate going to meet his justice.
“Quiet on the ward,” she said to Dovey.
“Gulp,” Dovey replied.
She had noticed her son’s wrists sprouting like wheat stems out of his sleeves, and now also noted the visible expanse of sock above his shoes. A growth spurt, finally. Perfect timing, she could upsize his wardrobe on the cheap here if she could drag him out of his books. Somberly he gathered an armload of the yellow volumes, ignoring his sister, who was stuffing books in the alligator purse and dumping them out. Preston waited an eternity at the second register behind a woman buying a floor lamp, who seemed to have an issue with it. The tattoo kid at the register seemed attentive to her monologue. A good sign, it went to character. Dovey and Dellarobia stood mute with apprehension. From the distance, they couldn’t hear, but watched as Preston articulated his claim. The kid took one of the books from Preston, looking it over carefully.
“At the college where Pete and Dr. Byron teach,” Dellarobia said quietly, “the students send them e-mails to demand what grades they want. Can you imagine?”
When the cashier gave his verdict, they saw Preston’s whole body react, the pump of his fist, the faintly audible hiss of joy, yesss! He turned and looked back across the long jumble of castoffs toward his mother, meeting her eyes with a cocksure expression wholly unlike anything she knew of her son. She felt pierced by loss. He would go so far. Maybe she had the same stuff inside, the same map of the big picture, but the goods had passed through her to lodge in her son and awaken him. Already he had the means and the will for the journey.
A strange fog rolled over February. Hester called it an omen, but in a winter so persistently deviant as this one, most people were sick of weather talk and greeted the latest act without a salute. For Dellarobia its downside just now was that it reduced morning visibility nearly to zero. Clouds lay low on the mountain, erasing its peaks, making the rugged landscape look like flatland. With binoculars she scanned the yellowish roost trees in the valley where the fog’s veil dimmed all the forest colors to a uniform dun like an old photograph. She sat in a lawn chair, not ten feet from the spot where she’d first laid eyes on the monarchs. The place was unrecognizable now, thanks to the graveled turnaround Bear put here and the traffic flow his engineering had helped facilitate. She wasn’t here to count sightseers, but this morning had seen six. This was the end of the road, as far as vehicles were concerned. Some tourists parked and hoofed it down the path toward the study site for a better view. Others stayed in their cars, taking their gander from here and then heading back home.
Dr. Byron had told her the fog was no mystery, but a predictable part of a warm front. He could even make physics safe for consumption, in small, digestible bites. Warm air held more water; that made sense to her. The sudden crispness of autumn days, the static sparkling in her rayon pajamas on frigid nights, this was air with the water squeezed out. A glass of iced tea dripping in summertime was hot air, wet as a sponge, meeting its match. These things she could see.