In minutes, they both stood at the kitchen door. She was nearly as tall as Ovid, cut from the same sinuous cloth, one shade darker, but her accent was not like his. Her voice was a deep, honeyed song overlaid with precision, consonants so clear the touch of tongue to teeth was audible. Her name, of course, Dellarobia knew.
Juliet. Emerson. “I know, right?” Juliet said with a musical laugh. “Ovid and Juliet, Emerson Byron. People say we sound like an AP English exam.”
Whatever that test might entail, it was not the source of Dellarobia’s dismay. Ovid suddenly was talkative. He had gone to meet her plane yesterday in Knoxville, but everything went wrong. Dellarobia was at a loss to follow the train of mishaps. An equipment failure, a missed connection, he’d ended up driving all the way to Atlanta to meet her, and driving back after dark. They’d stopped somewhere in north Georgia to spend the night in a Walmart parking lot. Preston and Cordie stood close to their mother and stared at this new Ovid with his arm around the lady.
“Juliet is not crazy about long drives in the camper,” Ovid said.
“It’s okay, I just took a little walk to stretch my legs,” she said, obviously not unhappy and surely, Dellarobia thought, long-legged enough. She had a way of slowly lowering her eyes when she spoke that was not coy but generous, as if she hoped to send attention elsewhere. An unlikely expectation, looking as she did. Even her closed eyes were beautiful and enormous, like bronze tulip bulbs. The headscarf was printed with peacock feathers and twined in some inscrutable way with her vigorous hair.
“Have you seen our part of the country before?” Dellarobia thought to ask.
“No. I grew up in the South, but flat south. Mississippi. Ovid didn’t tell me it was so beautiful here.”
“Well,” Dellarobia said. “Welcome.”
They wanted a recommendation for where they could dine out that night. “My wife has found me out,” Ovid said. “My trash bin is filled with pork-and-bean tins, and from this she deduces I have gone completely feral.”
“Not fe-ral,” Juliet said, lightly imitating his accent. “Just reverting to bachelorhood in the wilds, as always.”
The accused stood with his arm around his wife’s waist as if he did not mean to let go. They looked like two willow trees, struck by lightning and fused. Dellarobia told them dining out in Feathertown occurred at the Dairy Prince, and confessed that anything else was beyond her sphere. She did the only thing ordinary kindness allowed, not to mention the Scriptures, gesturing at the large joint of meat in the roasting pan on her counter: more than enough to entertain strangers. For thereby some have entertained angels unawares, though angels, she knew, traveled with baggage.
Ovid and Juliet had met in Mexico City at a conference on monarchs. He was there as a representative of science, and she of art. She was not an artist herself, she was quick to explain in her demurring way, the smooth angular wrist flicking away attention, its bangles riveting the eye. A folklorist, she said, a word Dellarobia somehow linked with those painted wooden bracelets. They resembled toys you’d find in an attic, relics from the pre-plastic era. Juliet studied art made by other people who did not think they were artists, first in Mississippi and then Africa and eventually Mexico for her doctoral research. She’d made a study of decorative objects made by people who lived near the monarch roosts, down through the ages.
“You’d be amazed what the monarchs represent for them,” Juliet said. “Even now. Some people believe they’re the souls of dead children.”
Dellarobia felt astonished by connections unforeseen. “One of Preston’s little friends told me that. Her family used to live there.”
Dellarobia’s brain felt like a pot boiling over on the stove. There was way too much going on in there. Four adults and two kids at her kitchen table left no room for anything else, so she carved the roast on the counter and filled the plates, arranging the potatoes and carrots on each, spooning the gravy and delivering them fast so it wouldn’t all go cold. In other times Cub would have announced, “My wife used to be a hasher,” not in a teasing way but with the reverence of an ox in the presence of flight. His wife could handle three plates at once. The wide and bottomless emptiness she would feel, being admired for such a thing as that. But tonight Cub hardly spoke. She could see in his eyes that he had gained some drift of her expansive unhappiness. Although from her labored attempts to explain things yesterday, he’d probably picked up only one narrow band of the spectrum: that he disappointed her. He’d spent the day building lambing jugs, expressing himself with a hammer in an empty barn.
Juliet had walked through the back door this evening in slim jeans and tall shoes and a dazzling loose tunic, orange and yellow and black, and a yellow headscarf wrapped differently from the earlier one, allowing a greater overspilling of her hair. Dellarobia’s eye kept going back to the innumerable glossy braids the same way she admired a gorgeous jacket lining, for the work involved. Ovid and Juliet handed her something in a twisted, candle-like paper bag they called a Riesling, which turned out to be wine. They apologized that it didn’t really go with lamb, Dellarobia apologized for not really having a way to open it, and Ovid went to fetch a corkscrew from his home in the yard. Cub did not partake of the Riesling, though Dellarobia did, just a little. Their best glasses were heavy blue plastic. Preston asked for a taste and, denied that, wanted to smell it. He took a long, hearty whiff and howled, “Pew!”
“You probably think we’re cave people,” Dellarobia said, though she did not feel as if she were in a cave. That she’d stepped off a cliff was more like it, yesterday in the cab of Cub’s truck, and was falling still. Every known feeling belonged to someone else, some previous occupant. This house was what it was, Ovid had seen it, and honestly there was no knowing what might please or offend Juliet. Apparently she collected paintings made by old men on discarded saw blades, which sounded like something Hester might buy at a yard sale. Juliet had six or seven years on Dellarobia, plus an education and fashion sense and many things Dellarobia suspected she was not equipped to detect. Juliet’s face, alone, deserved its own audience. Her mouth was broad and expressive, somehow muscular, in the way her lips curled outward when she spoke. She smiled with her chin forward like someone singing in a choir. Cub had come late to the table with his hair still wet from the shower and his mind unprepared to be blown by the likes of Juliet. He scrutinized her with an attention span that was probably inappropriate, and definitely atypical. Tonight he did not channel-surf. He stayed with the Juliet channel.