Ruby was walking across the kitchen as she talked, trying to keep her feet on a line in the floor. She’s walking the plank, Olivia imagined. Or taking a sobriety test. She was somewhere else, that was for certain. Softly, Ruby hummed. Olivia recognized the tune. “Crazy.” In her head, as Ruby hummed, Olivia filled in the words.
They settled into a routine, Olivia and Ruby: walks on the beach and visits to the obstetrician and videos to rent. Olivia began to feel as if she was entering the real world again. Whenever she and David had been apart, for a night or a weekend or a week, they called those first few hours of coming back together and catching up on each other “reentry.” It was how she thought about this time with Ruby. Reentry. Olivia saw the beach differently, the oiled bodies stretched out before her in the daytime, the radios blaring, all on different stations, the smell of clam cakes and seaweed. In the evening, it was quiet, with salty air and treasures on the shore—beach glass and shells and pieces of oddly shaped driftwood.
There were long talks, too; Olivia heard about eight of Ruby’s nine guys. She did not hear about Ben. But Ruby told her about each of the others in great detail: Jay, the football player and student council president, who used Ruby to defy his parents—“He smashed my teeth when we kissed, like I thought they would fall out or something”; Rollo, the local drug dealer—“He like never came because he rubbed coke on his dick; I swear to God”; all of the stories horrible and sad in some way, even though Ruby always made them funny, always made herself the ironic onlooker instead of the lonely girl desperate for love that Olivia suspected she really was.
At night, when Ruby was asleep—and she went to sleep early now—Olivia watched her. She went over in her mind how foolish she was, how crazy, really, to take in this girl. How foolish she was to want Ruby’s baby so badly. What did she know about raising a child? She had never even held a baby, not a newborn. Olivia thought she should be terrified. She thought she should be cautious. She thought she should stop all of this before Ruby did something worse than robbing her. But mostly, she thought that some little part of her had come back to life. Mostly, she sat across the room from Ruby and kept an eye on her until all the late-night talk shows were over and the local news had been replayed and television finally ended. Then Olivia roused Ruby, led her up the stairs, and put her to bed. That was when Olivia slept, too.
It was the first of July, relentlessly hot, and Ruby was in her seventh month. Her face was blotchy and bloated; she no longer looked like a kid. She was uncomfortable, complaining about a foot in her ribs, indigestion, sinus trouble. On the phone, Winnie reported the same kind of things to Olivia, but Olivia lived them every day with Ruby. Their due dates were exactly three weeks apart. Whenever Winnie told Olivia a new symptom or development, Olivia would say, “I know. I know.”
Olivia started to make hats again. She ordered supplies from New York and got to work on a new series, all of them straw the color of the sand on different beaches: Bermuda pink, wet sand, black volcanic sand, the sand of the beach Olivia walked with Ruby here. The hats had wide brims, contrasting trim, and flat, tight bows—beach hats like women wore in the twenties and thirties. She sat on the lawn, shaping them, naming them for famous beaches: Cape May, Truro, Captiva. Ruby watched from a chaise longue beside her, wearing her own funny pink hat.
That was how the Realtor found them one hot afternoon.
She teetered toward them on her too-high heels. She wore a suit the color of cantaloupe, the jacket’s underarms damp.
“Hello,” the Realtor said, with so much cheerfulness that Ruby laughed and answered with a big false hello.
“Just checking on your progress,” the Realtor said, frowning at Ruby and Olivia and the house.
Olivia spread out her arms. “Well,” she said, “here we are.”
“Yes.” The Realtor chewed on her bottom lip.
“I’m thinking,” Olivia said, “that maybe it’s not time to sell.”
“No, it is! The market is up, up, up. You’ll make a killing.”
“Not that,” Olivia said, aware of Ruby watching her, aware of the Realtor’s thick perfume, and the grass itching beneath her, and Ruby’s obviously pregnant self, and her hats spread before her. “I’m not ready to sell yet. That’s what I mean.”
The Realtor bent down as best she could in her tight cantaloupe miniskirt. “It’s a hard thing. I know that. To sell your dream house. But when you let go of it, you’ll be able to move on.”
“The thing is,” Olivia said, looking right into the Realtor’s eyes, “I’m not ready.” The woman’s mascara was caked in the corners and made little dots where she blinked.
The Realtor stood and cleared her throat. “When you’re ready, you’ll call. You can’t rush things like this. I know that. I understand that.”
She held out her business card and Ruby took it from her.
“You’re?” the Realtor asked.
“The pregnant teenager,” Ruby said.
“It made me sad,” Ruby said as the Miata drove away. “When she called this your ‘dream house.’ Dreams always get smashed, huh?”