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"Do you prefer Mrs or Ms or none of the above?"
"Mrs, I guess" She let out a joyless laugh "Until lanced up at her over his reading glasses "For doing?"
"Taking this job Don’t worry, that was a joke He won’t"
"He has so personal My fa outside the hoested he found this not typical He didn’t know the half of it People were praying for her family now, on account of that picture on the Internet Cub’s father had told hiot such attention only if she asked for it
"I spoke out of turn," she said "I’ll handleoff his skinny glasses and holding them by the earpiece "Because I can assure you, ill be taking every precaution here, exactly as if ere in a , she wanted to scream at him, was a question of safety All hu kept inside a pu flung into space
"Seriously, don’t worry about it," she repeated Dr Byron wrote so on his clipboard without comment
Somewhere in the roo plastic sheeting to the walls They weretheir laboratory in the sheep barn Contrary to her expectations, a butterfly lab looked so like a kitchen with outlandishly expensive appliances For two days she’d been helping theht from New Mexico, and she kneas badabout the costs of things They couldn’t give her exact answers The equipment was not necessarily new Most of it, in fact, seean administration," they both remarked dolefully, as if that had been so side But when she pressed thelass box called the Mettler balance, which they handled like a newborn baby, was " oven, a drab gray thing about the size of any oven, and the antique-looking round tub called a centrifuge, which weighed so much they left it in its case until Pete could build a heavy table to serve as its throne The wooden shipping crates, bulky as coffins, would become the foundations of a lab counter, which they called a bench
When she unscrolled the bubble wrap fro little blender, Ovid had rehborhood of two grand, he’d said, made in Germany Its name was Tissuemizer, and its special task was to , as the ingredients were both toxic and fla hood of the type usually installed over kitchen ranges to eli Dellarobia had never owned She’d just learned the hard way never to cook anything too fishy But Dr Byron needed a range hood, so the appliance department at Sears had been called to come and install one in the Turnbow sheep barn, pronto They would also be delivering a freezer, the cheapest model available, but even so, a stand-alone freezer Not a coe, into which ordinary mothers crammed Popsicles and freeze-packs for their kids’ bruises Dellarobia found herself coveting a freezer that was not yet even technically, until delivery, thy neighbor’s goods
The official plan was to keep this lab in operation until the butterflies fleay from their winter roost, which under normal circumstances occurred in March, she was told Then Ovid would pack up all this equipht come on the market for a secondhand price at that tie hood? Would he think to arrange for repair of the hole it left behind? The science creas going throughto ask you to fill inthrough several pages on his clipboard "Date of birth, social security E It’s only this first box, it looks like I am supposed to do that myself"
She wondered how much he knew of her miserable notoriety, the naked-ish picture, the suicide business Her days swung between fury and huhts of permanent anxiety, as she waited for Cub to find out She envisioned crash landings everywhere Dr Byronher on as a pity case Or even as so plan The lease he’d signed for this lab space gave Bear so room, financially, and Dellarobia knew he and Hester were involved in sootiations with Money Tree It was possible they could return the advance iven until March to co as Bear could wipe out these scientists’ reason for being here with a stroke of heavy ht be just the sucker punch that would ain And Hester wouldn’t hold with that In Dellarobia’s in-law career she had never seen so ht between those two
"How round?" Dr Byron asked
"Science?" She considered this "None? Well, biology and stuff High school"
He looked surprised "No college?"
"No college Sorry" She wondered if humiliation ever ran its natural course and peeled off, like sunburn, or just kept blazing She watched him fill in more lines on his form without comment He didn’t even look up at her She tried not to flinch with each of Pete’s explosive blasts overhead, like repeating rifle shots Pete was using a construction-grade staple gun to secure giant sheets of plastic over every inch of the walls, for the sake of creating cleanable surfaces She could see the do, at least until her kids were grown Noas stretching it even across the rough wooden beaets covered?" she asked quietly
Dr Byron’s eyes went upward and then down again, like awhat could fall out of that ceiling," he said "The nu is dust"