Joy looked down at the piece of pink paper in her hand, then gingerly dropped it onto a paper napkin she pulled out of her pocketbook. “What?” she said. “That is disgusting, Ben. What is the matter with you? Is this what people do in New Orleans? Are you insane?…”
She went on and on, making her way to the bathroom sink to wash her hands, Ben following like a shamed dog, which is just what he had behaved like, a dog. On the street. Public urination? There was a ticket for that, that specifically? How much urine was on the public street if they had to maintain a special traffic violation category for it? “Why on earth did you pee in the street? In public?”
“It was really late at night. Everything was closed. And, you know, New York has no public bathrooms. In Paris they have public toilets.”
She paused. She said, “Ah.” She said, “Well.”
He knew the word “Paris” would do it. She had taken him to Paris once, when he was quite young. Just the two of them. She had gone to do some research for the museum, and she brought him along. She made him go to a ridiculous number of museums, but mostly they ate and walked.
“Oh, Ben,” she said. “What is to become of us?”
“I didn’t pee on the ticket, Grandma.”
She picked it up and folded it neatly and zipped it up somewhere in her bag. “Our secret,” she said.
34
Molly’s department had gotten a request to excavate a racehorse that had been buried in the 1960s at a racecourse that was closing. The owners of the horse wanted him and his memorial moved to another racecourse intact. Molly had never heard of the horse, but Freddie told her he was quite famous in California. Her father had been a fan.
Molly called Ruby in New York and said, “I don’t know why, I thought it would interest you.”
“Do you think I’m morbid, Aunt Molly?”
“A little.”
“Yes, it does interest me. Is the horse in a casket?”
“No. Afraid not. A canvas sack. We may not find much. But the shoes should be intact.”
“Can I have one?”
“No.”
“Can I come?”
The excavation of the racehorse happened to coincide with Ruby’s vacation, and after a relentless campaign of whining, Ruby convinced her parents to allow her to go to Los Angeles to stay with her aunts.
Joy was horrified. “We just buried Daddy,” she said when Molly phoned to tell her. “Don’t you think it’s too upsetting for a little girl to dig up a dead body so soon? It’s too upsetting for me, that I can tell you. I’m sorry, Molly, but I do not want to hear any more about horse corpses. Goodbye.”
“I didn’t even think of my father,” Molly told Freddie. “My mother said it’s a lack of imagination.”
“Well, good. You remember him as he was. I remember my mother as she was. It’s more realistic, in a way. We don’t live in a horror movie, after all.”
“No,” Molly said. “Do you think my mother does?”
Freddie chose to say nothing, which Molly seemed to find reassuring, because she smiled as if at her own foolishness and said, “Of course not. Of course she doesn’t.”
*
At first, Cora did not want to be left behind.
“Do you really want to watch Aunt Molly dig up an old dead horse?” her father asked.
She thought about it. The horse might smell. It was probably a skeleton, which was bad enough, but it might look like the Mummy or a horse zombie. And the digging was slow, which could be boring. “Joanie and I were going to have a lemonade stand outside the building. It’s not very warm yet, but you can do good business that week because of tourists.”
“So you’d rather stay home?”
Cora nodded. “You write the e’s on the sign backward. To make it look childish. It draws customers.”
He was glad at least one of them would be home. Daniel had never understood that you could love anyone as much as he loved Ruby and Cora. This love was new, born when they were born. Now life without that love coursing through him was unimaginable. Their voices were like birdsong, their movements like dance.
“Every morning when I see them my heart sings, it really sings,” he said to Molly. “I don’t want Ruby to visit you. I’ll miss her too much.”
Molly felt a pang of longing for Ben. “It never goes away, missing them.”
“Like Mom and you.”
“Not what I was thinking of.”
“I, on the other hand, am the good sibling who stayed home,” he said happily.
“The oceans are rising,” she replied.
*
Molly stood with Freddie and Ruby waiting for Ruby’s suitcase.
“In Japan they have sushi that goes around just like this, on a conveyor belt, but smaller, obviously,” Ruby said.
“You’ve been to Japan?”
“No. But I like sushi. But Daddy says overfishing is ruining the ocean.”
“We’ll get you some sushi.”
“Thank you, Aunt Freddie. And thank you, Aunt Molly, for inviting me to your dig.”
“It’s not the walls of Troy,” Molly said. “But it’s good practice for the students. The horse died of colic very suddenly. They didn’t even mark the grave properly, so we’ll have a bit of a search.”
“Did they shoot him?”