Page 3 (1/1)
Her betrayals shocked her It was like watching sohtly cuter version of herself on television, doing things a person could never do with just nor Cordelia down for early naps while Preston was at kindergarten so she could steal a ains with a e to call hi in both her ears More than once she’d driven past where he lived, telling the kids in the back seat that she’d forgotten soo back to the store She would say it was for ice cream or bullet pops, to shush them, but even a five-year-old could tell it was not the road to the store Preston had voiced his suspicions from his booster seat, which allowed hi trees and telephone lines
The telephone man, as she called this obsession--his name was too ordinary, you wouldn’t wreck your life for a Jimmy--"the telephone man" was barely a man Twenty-two, he’d said, and that was a stretch He lived in a s that interested et shooting There was no excuse for going off the deep end over so his own six-packs She longed for relief fro She’d had crushes before, but this one felt life-threatening, especially while she was lying in bed next to Cub She’d tried taking a Valiu in the decade-old prescription bottle they’d given her back when she lost the first baby But the pill did nothing, probably expired, like everything on the preer on purpose whilea hole in Cordie’s pajamas, and watched the blood ju back The wound still throbbed Mortification of the flesh And none of it stopped her fro by where he’d told her he would be working, just for the sight of hie turn of fortune had sent him her way in the first place: a tree that fell on a windless day, bringing down the phone line directly in front of her house She and Cub didn’t have a landline, it wasn’t even her problem, but a downed line had to be reconnected "For the folks that are still hanging on by wires," Ji that came next was nonsensical, like a torrential downpour in a week of predicted sunshine that floods out the crops and the well- the rain and mud, these are only elements The disaster is the failed expectation
And now here she went risking everything, pointing her little chin up that hill and walking unarmed into the shoot-out of whatever was to be Heartbreak, broken faht do for uess She hadn’t been eular to human conversation since the Feathertown Diner closed, back when she was pregnant with Preston Nobody would hire her again as a waitress They’d side with Cub, and half the toould clai, just because they thrived on downfalls of any sort Wild in high school, that’s how it goes with the pretty ones, early to ripe, early to rot They would say the sa she’d heard her mother-in-law tell Cub: that Dellarobia was a piece of work As if she were lying in pieces on a table, pins stuck here and there, half assembled from a Simplicity pattern that was flawed at the manufacturer’s Which piece had been left out?
People would likely line up to give opinions about that The part that thinks ahead, for one A stay-at-ho sense to the four winds to run after a handso like there was no toested he’d be willing to bring her golden apples, or the Mississippi River The way he closed his fingers in a bracelet around her ankles and wrists, ave her the dimensions of an expensive jewel rather than an inconsequential adult No one had ever listened to her the way he did Or looked, touching her hair reverently, trying to nan and sunset, he said So And her skin He called her "Peach"
No one else had ever called her anything Only the given name her mother first sounded out for the birth certificate in a doped anesthetic haze, thinking it ca; it wasn’t the Bible, she’d heard it at a craft demonstration at the Woazine and yelled for her daughter to come look Dellarobia was maybe six at the time and still realued on a Styrofoa pretty, even still," her e co events Her performance to date was not what the Savior prescribed Except irl with big dreams but no concrete plans, especially if a baby should be on the way The baby that never quite was, that she never got to see, a e fine hair all over its body that was red like hers Preston and Cordelia when they later arrived were both blonds, cut from the Turnbow cloth, but that first one that ca like her Roping a pair of du off with a laugh, leaving the five years for another baby, just to fill a hole nobody ht her eye and yanked her glance upward How did it happen, that attention could be wrenched like that by so, a fleck of orange wobbling above the trees It crossed overhead and drifted to the left, where the hill dropped steeply frohosts Making things up was beneath her She set her eyes on the trail, purposefully not looking up She was losing the fight against this hill, panting like a sheep A poplar beside the trail invited her to stop there a minute She fit its smooth bulk between her shoulder blades and cupped her hands to light the cigarette she’d been craving for half an hour Inhaled through her nose, counted to ten, then gave in and looked up again Without her glasses it took so, but there it still was, drifting in blank air above the folded terrain: an orange butterfly on a rainy day Its out-of-place brashness made her think of the wacked-out sequences in children’s books: Which of these does not belong? An apple, a banana, a taxicab A nice farmer, a married mother of two, a sexy telephone ht color waver up the hollohile she finished her cigarette and carefully ground out the butt with her boot When she walked on, pulling her scarf around her throat, she kept her eyes glued to the ground This boy had better be worth it: there was a thought Not the sexiest one in the world, either Possibly a sign of sense returning