Indiana-Michigan Line, 1934
Dorothy ran her thumb over the truculent lone hair under her chin. She could just make out the singer on the radio downstairs.
“No fair!” Irene shouted.
Dorothy started, then listened as the child’s siblings calmed their sister. She had taken exception to Margaret buying something called “Park Place.” Irene, prickly like her mother, Ruth, though not yet eight years old, would make noise about her disagreement. She was sturdy like that.
Well, all the girls needed to be sturdy now, now that their dad was awake. Dorothy suspected the girls were up here hiding from him. She should have made them go to bed, but she supposed that they were all stirred up from his awakening. She didn’t blame them. He was a stranger to the twins, and all of a sudden he was supposed to be special to them. That would take some adjusting. To the older girls, he was something even scarier—a real dad now instead of the dream dad they would have created from the haze of their early experiences. Thinking of your parents as people was hard enough in any circumstance.
She pictured her own father when she was a little girl, up in their rooms, dressing to serve dinner to the Lambs. How handsome he was in his long black tails and with those bushy red side-whiskers! She saw his head tilted down in concentration as he poked a cuff link through its slot, his muttonchops glistening like chipmunk fur. She wanted to stroke them, but she never could, of course. She never touched him, nor he, her.
She’d been so proud of him! It never occurred to her when she was young that he was lower in rank than Mr. Lamb, even when her mother scolded him for drinking milk out of a cereal bowl, or for walking around their quarters in his undervest, or for sweating when serving a party of fifty, and other “ungentlemanly” offenses. Dorothy thought he was perfect. She loved to watch him read his newspaper in his chair under the floor lamp, his side-whiskers gleaming and his brown eyes frowning at the print.
One time while Dorothy was studying him, he surprised her by grabbing her mother when she walked by—surprised her mother, too, by the sound of Mother’s squawk. Father had pulled her into his lap and kissed her neck until they saw little Dorothy laughing, and then Mother had jumped up and fled and he had gone back to his reading. Dorothy had wished she’d been the one who’d been pulled onto his lap. But she never was.
No wonder she didn’t know what to do when William was affectionate after they were married. She thought at first that it meant he needed male release, so she braced herself for relations. It was the least that she could do in repayment for his kindnesses, and sometimes he did make it feel rather fine. But to her surprise, often he just wanted to pat her shoulder, kiss her hair, or squeeze her hand, just for the sake of doing it. Once she understood that, she was grateful.
She never did know how to give him a little pat, though, just to pat him for the sake of patting him. She would have liked to. She even thought about it, hovering around him, wanting to reach out, coaxing herself to touch him.
But she was stopped by the fear that he’d want something more from her, more than relations, something that she didn’t know how to give, and so she kept her hand to herself, even as another layer of loneliness poured over her heart like liquid rubber.
Something thudded against the side of the house. “What was that?” cried one of the girls.
Everyone paused to listen to a deep howling in the distance. An attic timber popped.
The girls shuffled in a herd to Dorothy’s bedside.
“I miss Granddad,” said Margaret.
Jeanne put a bedraggled hank of hair in her mouth. “Me, too. He’d make it go away.”
All four nodded, a symphony of fresh skin, dirty bobs, and worried faces.
“How?” said Dorothy. “How could he make a storm go away?”
Quick to be the authority, little Irene, always her mother’s daughter, spoke up. “He’d tell us a story.”
“Like what?”
She raised her chin to recite. “ ‘Elgie met a bear. The bear was bulgy. The bulge was Elgie.’ ”
“That could make a storm go away?”
“If that didn’t work, he held our hand.”
Dorothy gazed out over this little crowd that shared her blood. They didn’t ask her to tell stories. They didn’t ask her to hold their hands. They didn’t even consider it. She could lift her quilt now and invite them in, even as she peeled up a corner of her frightened old heart. But what if they refused to come?
The far-off roaring seemed to ease. Margaret pulled at Ilene’s wrist. “Hey, it’s your turn.” She dropped to her knees over by the board game, as did her sisters. “Where’s the other dice? Who’s got the other dice?”
Ilene plunged under the bed then crawled back out. She opened her child’s soft palm. “Here!”
The dice skittered across the floor. Dorothy lowered herself by degrees back down to her pillow, back into the bitter smell of feathers. They probably wouldn’t have come to her, anyhow.
The wind banging her skirt against her legs, Ruth gave the crank a good yank with her left hand—never with her right unless she wanted that arm broken if the engine backfired—then jumped into the stuttering car. She had left Richard inside the Squibbs’ tidy house with its lattice-skirted porch. Ethel Squibb was still stuffing him with oatmeal raisin cookies, payment, in general, for his finding the cure for sleeping sickness, and in particular, for opening an impromptu nighttime clinic for her family. He’d made his important call and now he promised to check on her little Alvin, sick in bed with a cough for two weeks now, and on her little Teddy with the leg that would not heal, and to lance a boil on Squibb’s back. Even half-awake in gowns and nightcaps, they worshipped him, which he gobbled up more greedily than the cookies. Anyhow, Ruth didn’t have time to wait for him to finish, especially after they started grilling him about life with Betty Crocker. The storm was ugly and it hadn’t even started raining yet. The Squibbs would take care of him. She had to get back home.
She wheeled the car in a circle, avoiding an empty bushel sent rolling across the yard and the wooden clothesline prop that had been knocked down into the grass. When she nosed the trembling flivver from the high hedge of privets onto the road, the wind seized on the car immediately, shaking it like a dog with a toy.
She nursed the old sedan along in the dark, hoping, all the while, that Nick had gotten the cows in. He’d be good with them, gentle with Boss as he led her in so as not to panic the herd. He was gentle with Ruth herself like that—to keep her from panicking, she thought with a laugh, and then frowned at the truth of it. Nick knew what a prickly pear she was, yet he was kind to her. It was a marvel. She hated to let him go.
But she had to. If John and she had any chance, he could not stay. She wouldn’t wait to find out what John knew about them—she’d go right to John and beg for forgiveness. She’d been stupid and weak and out of her head with anger and fear. She loved John, had loved him since she had first laid eyes on him when June had brought him home. There was such a thing as love at first sight—she’d felt it. He was her sister’s beau and yet Ruth knew that he would be her own husband the moment she saw him, as improbable as that seemed. No one took a man from June, especially not her star-crossed sister with the bad reputation and the even worse moods.
But Ruth had.
The headlights sifted over the weeds slapping around on the roadside and to a structure of logs—the cabin John’s great-grandfather had built. How the house still stood after storms like this one was a mystery to her. What was keeping the logs stacked that some tough pioneer had wrestled there years ago, when much of the mud chinking had fallen away and the roof had bowed? Sheer memory of standing?
A gust swept dirt from the road, spraying it against the windshield in a gritty hiss.
The barn doors were bolted shut when Ruth wheeled into the yard; the chicken coop was sealed tight. She was aiming the car for the machine shed when she saw Nick, standing at the foundation of the house, peering into the parlor window.
That was peculiar. Surely he had the sense to go in during this kind of weather. He’d left his lantern on the back porch. Upstairs, a lamp was burning in the kids’ room. They weren’t in bed?
She parked the car then dashed to the house though it wasn’t raining yet.
Nick snatched up the lantern and blocked the door.
“What’s going on?” she panted.
The lantern light gave his face the look of one of those sad drama masks, all downturned mouth and eyes. “It is probably nothing.”
She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. “What is nothing?”
“Why are you out here?” She moved to get past him.
“Root, wait.”
“You’re scaring me!”
She brushed by his arm and pushed through the door.
By the light trickling in from the parlor, she could see that the kitchen was empty. Radio music drifted in from the parlor. She strode to it.
When she burst into the room, June lifted her head from John’s shoulder. They were pressed together like lovers.
June felt John jolt. Ruth stormed into the room.
She hardly had time to lift her head before Ruth demanded, “What are you doing?”
June ironed the guilt from her voice. She had nothing to be guilty about. She was dancing with a lonely man before she went back to her own husband. “Where’s Richard? Is everything all right?”
“Maybe I should be asking you that.”
“It’s all right, Ruth.”
“If you must know the truth,” said John lightly, “she’s doing me the service of propping me up.”
“Is that what you call it?”
John reached out to her. “Ruth, come on. Don’t.”
“Don’t what? I kept the farm going for you. I kept this roof over your head. I kept your kids alive. I did everything—for you.”
“I know you did. We all know you did.”
Ruth turned on June. “You. You can’t stand for me to have anything. Why is that?”
“That’s not true.”
“But you love to give to your poor little sister the charity case, don’t you. I bet that makes you feel big. Miss Generosity. ”
“I wish you wouldn’t do this, Ruth.”
“I’m not pathetic, June. I may not be Betty Crocker, but there are people who respect me. There are people who know I will do whatever it takes. Some people lean on me, hard—your own bigwig husband, even. Do you know that he came to me just now with his tail between his legs? I don’t know why he would expose himself like that.” She hiccupped with a laugh, as if realizing she’d inadvertently said something funny.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, nothing. Go back to your dancing.”
John steadied himself against the armchair then raised his head. “You don’t have to make trouble like this, Ruth. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“What way?”
“Just let people love you,” he said wearily. “When you’re not pushing us away, you are lovable, you know.”
“Ha. If you actually believed that, you wouldn’t have to say it.”
“Ruth.”
“Well, I have news for you—for all of you. People do love me.” She paused as if searching for examples, and then sputtered, “Our kids do! Our kids are angels. They’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” She gave June a pointed look. “Too bad you can’t have some of your own.” She laughed humorlessly. “Funny, the one thing the girl who has everything wants, she can’t have. It’s a sad state of affairs, isn’t it, when even if you’re perfect, you can’t get what you want.”
“That’s enough,” said John.
“I do feel bad for you, Junie. I take less joy from your situation than you’d think. All this time, you blamed yourself. Turns out that you weren’t the one who was at fault.”
Something inside June went icy. “For what?”
Ruth shrugged. “Ask Richard.”
Nick edged into the room. Seeing June’s stricken face, he laid his hand on Ruth’s shoulder. “Root, what are you doing?”
She looked up at him, then pulled back into herself.
“She has been so tired,” Nick told them.
Ruth sagged against him. “Get me out of here.”
“Where, Root? You are home.”
Her voice had fallen to a whisper. “Just get me out.”
“But, Root, a storm is coming.”
John pushed off from the chair as if to go to her. “Ruth.”
“No!” She clutched Nick’s arm. “Please.” Her voice was small. “Help me.”
He bowed to June in apology. “I must help her. She is a good woman. She is only tired.”
He led her away, as does a father guiding a child.
“I’ll go get her.” John took a step, then buckled against the chair. “I guess I’m losing steam.”
June blinked at him through the silent screaming in her head. She was not to blame. Ask Richard.