LaRose crept out of bed and sneaked into the laundry room. He poured the skull-and-crossbones bottle down the utility sink drain and put the empty jug out in the garage. He crept back into bed and slept hard.
Maggie was the one who had trouble sleeping. In vast schools of infinite classrooms, on ever branching roads, towns that stretched across worlds, she tried to find her mother. She would startle awake knowing that her mother was trapped behind a padlocked door, lost on a lost road, wandering in a lightless city. One night Maggie spent hours biting and scratching off her nail polish. Next morning her face was covered with light green flecks. When she came down for breakfast, her mother touched a flake of green off her face and looked at it.
What’s this?
Instead of walking away without answering, enfuried that her mother had dared to touch her face and ask a question, Maggie just said, Nail polish.
The normal, nonsarcastic answer fell sweetly on Nola. She loved Maggie with all of the ripped-up pieces of her heart now. Nola turned to the cutting board and started sawing away at potatoes with a steak knife. Things were disappearing. She was losing things right and left, running out of things, failing to buy things, forgetting. But these matters were not as important as other people seemed to think. They were not crucial. In fact, they didn’t matter at all.
EVERY DAY AFTER the gray dawn or the blue dawn, Hollis stomped sleepily out to the dusty mold-green Mazda with its sagging fender, mashed door. He’d bought this car for six hundred dollars. This car would carry Hollis, Snow, Josette, and Coochy to school in a week. On weekends it carried him off to his first National Guard drills. He and Mike had decided on a delayed-entry program—combat training delayed. School. Drills one weekend a month throughout the year. After graduation, basic combat and advanced individual training. Then he’d get going on his Guard job—maybe combat engineer. He still wasn’t positive. And get the money together for a move, he supposed, although he didn’t still want to. He was happy on the blow-up mattress. Even though his ass touched floor halfway through the night, he loved his sleeping corner. He wanted to keep living with the Irons after he graduated, maybe forever. Besides everything else, Hollis was forever hungry. Emmaline and the girls cooked big, tasty meat-rich stews, thick corn and potato soup, bannocks. Also, that long ago spark of holiday interest in Josette had caught. She had, for real, helped him with his summer read and even written most of his paper. He was the one who had leaned over her shoulder peering at her confident typing. Now a steady glow was his. More than a glow, really. Sometimes, flames.
First day of school. Hollis dressed and schlumped out to the kitchen, where he thought today, maybe, was the day. Maybe he would reveal his mad hopeless love for the mad hopeless glory of Josette.
Always, as soon as he came in the room, she began pouring cereal.
Hey.
Hey.
She was strong, had a wicked jumping overhand volleyball serve, her curves were powerful. She could put a thousand voice-layers into that one morning greeting and so could Hollis. The shadow in her Hey said, I’m into you! They rarely said more than Hey and Hey. But the way it was said would stay with each of them as the day wore on. Their Heys were a pilot light that could possibly flare up if Josette ever took her eyes off the cornflakes falling into her bowl.
If that occurred, Hollis imagined a stare-down in which the animal tension became unbearable. But maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen that he was taken in by good people and he then poached the daughter of the house. Who was younger. So he took his bowl of cornflakes back to the boys’ room, and waited for the girls to call when they were ready for school.
That same morning, Emmaline woke with a clenched heart and could hardly breathe. When? She asked the star quilt hanging on the wall, and then answered herself. Now. LaRose was supposed to go back to the Ravich house, but when Emmaline touched his heavy brown hair she knew for sure. There had to be an end and this was it. From behind the closed door of her bedroom, she called the Ravich number. Peter answered.
I can’t stand it anymore, she said.
Peter felt the heavy sadiron of his heart lurch. He waited but it was stuck on the wrong side of his chest.
Ah, god, please, Emmaline.
I just can’t do it anymore. It was never supposed to go on forever, was it? Her voice began to shudder. She gathered herself, stood straight, tucked her hair behind her ears.
Listen, said Peter, stepping aside to look out the window. School is starting. It will get better.
I’m enrolling him here. With other Indians.
Nola was already up. She was outside fixing up the old chicken coop, painting it. Her thin arm swept back and forth.
Please let’s just keep going for a little while longer. Peter stopped. He was about to beg her for LaRose. That would make him angry. He would become hateful were he driven to that.