“Mom!” Preston howled. The bus had appeared over the hill. She sent him out of the road and prepared to flag down the bus if necessary. But the butterfly lovers achieved liftoff, taking their business up into the big maple. She retreated to the shoulder.
“Okay, buddy.” She stood a few paces from her son, giving him his dignity. “Make sure you learn stuff today.”
“I will,” he vowed, awaiting the driver’s signal before he charged across the road to climb aboard. Dellarobia always found the blaze of alternate-flashing school-bus lights a little surreal, coming and going through the veil of morning darkness. The hiss of released brakes gave way to the throaty diesel grumble, and her son was off to the world once more, leaving her dumbly bereft, unsettled by the morning’s several surprises.
She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and tried to move her mind into the day. If this was the end of diapause for the monarchs, that was huge. Ovid would be keen to do dissections, or if more sacrifice was unbearable, to palpate live females for the sperm packets that proved they were mating. She felt impatient with news she could not share. He was gone today. She didn’t have a phone number, except the one from which he’d first called her back in December, presumably from his house in New Mexico. No way could she call there. Very early this morning she’d heard his vehicle pull out, for parts unknown. He’d only said he would be gone all day. Some kind of interview seemed likely, given the way the Ovid-and-Tina video had gone viral. On Thursday Dovey had texted hourly updates on the number of views: hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands. Whatever qualms people had about scientists, they were thrilled to watch one rip into an ice-queen newscaster of some repute. Ovid was chagrined when he finally watched it himself, and Dellarobia felt for him; she knew that awful exposure. But he at least had put his turn at fame to good use. He’d been truthful. The first of his words Dovey had captured were “This is what science looks like,” and that’s what she tagged the post. She said it came up ninth on the list now, when you Googled “science.”
Dellarobia reentered her house feeling guilty without cause as she met Cub’s skeptical gaze. Not an unusual feeling. “Going to work in your pajama pants?” he asked.
“Nope. Dr. Byron’s gone someplace today.” He had urged her to take the day off too, she had put in many an extra hour. But the prospect of a workless morning didn’t excite her. She hung up her coat in the hallway and came into the kitchen. Cub had just unsnapped Cordelia’s terry-cloth bib and was wiping the oatmeal off her face.
“Cordie’s not going to Lupe’s, then?” The plane of his brow lifted in surprise.
Dellarobia filled and refilled her coffee mug a few times with hot water from the tap, and shook it out. It wasted hot water, but her mug always got so chilled by the bus wait, it would spoil a second cup if she didn’t warm it up. “Sorry I didn’t mention that. I was debating whether I should go in anyway. There’s still stuff to do in the lab, without him around.”
Cub made a game of dabbing Cordelia’s cheeks and nose while she tried to smack his hand. Eventually they called a truce, and he lifted her out of the high chair. “Well, I’m going over to Mother’s,” he said, rolling down the sleeves of his flannel shirt and brushing oatmeal off the front. “She’s got a load of stuff she wants me to haul over to the church for the town ministry.”
Dellarobia took a gratifying swallow of scalding coffee and leaned back against the counter. “You know what? I’ve got a bunch of Preston’s outgrown pants I could give them.” The town ministry was a free food pantry for Feathertown’s needy, now expanding to offer clothing and winter coats, child sizes needed especially. For those who found themselves even below the Second Time Around bracket. “What’s Hester giving away?” she asked.
Cub shrugged, a gesture identical to the one his son had offered her ten minutes earlier. “Some of her canned goods, I guess. But she wants me to take my truck to haul over that old chifforobe upstairs. They’re needing places to hang up all the coats.”
Dellarobia was still trying on the prospect of being a donor. She always took the kids’ clothes back for the minuscule trade-in discount. Now that she thought about it, she couldn’t recall having given anything away, ever. Not for charity, per se. “You mean that giant wardrobe in your old room?” she asked. “That thing’s a beast.”
“Well, Mother decided it needs to go to the ministry,” Cub said.
“How about I go with you to help,” Dellarobia offered unexpectedly. She and Cub had things to talk about.
Cub laughed. “A lot of help you’ll be, moving a chifforobe.”
“Brains instead of brawn, okay? I’ll open doors and stuff. We can leave Cordie with Hester for a couple of hours, they’ll both live. Just give me a sec to gather up those clothes.” Dellarobia got dressed and efficiently culled the kids’ drawers, where the outgrown items seemed to outnumber those that fit by a margin of two to one. Within thirty minutes they had packed up five grocery bags of donations and descended on Hester without warning, Cordelia and her toy bag in tow. Hester was in her living room with the niddy-noddy out and yarn all over everywhere, engrossed in winding skeins and measuring yardage. Cordie was going to be no help with this endeavor, it was plain to see, but Hester resigned herself, sending the parents upstairs to size up the chifforobe and carry down the boxes she’d packed. Dellarobia followed Cub’s slow climb up to the room that had contained his boyhood and, for its first few months, their marriage.
The room was unchanged, which hardly surprised Dellarobia. Nothing about it was ever altered even to accommodate the large life events she’d brought into it. She quaked at the barren familiarity of the 4H ribbons tacked along the crown molding, the ancient comic book collection, the two unopened bottles of Coca-Cola that were some special commemorative of something. Cub’s football trophies ran along the bookshelf, a string of small golden men all frozen in the same sprint, helmeted jaw thrust forward, left foot off the ground. She knew their look was deceptive; the little athletes were not really bronze but some kind of weightless plastic.
“I wonder if Hester’s even changed the sheets since we moved out,” she said. The bedspread was the same white chenille, extremely thin and to Dellarobia’s mind ungenerous, considering all the quilts that were folded away elsewhere in the house. But it was what they got. That was the weirdest part of living here as a married person, just accepting: this bedspread, this room, supper at seven. Cub’s parents in the adjacent room. She fell onto the bed, face up, arms flung out. “Oh, man. Remember this bed?”