Instead I stood up, snuck around the side of the house, climbed up the spoke-like branches of a spruce near Paul’s window. Patra lay on the bed with Paul reading a book. I could see their bodies spooned together, Patra’s arm wrapped around him, her face pressed into the sweaty hair at the back of his head. He held a sippy cup, half-tipped, in his hands. As Patra read to him, she kept kissing his one exposed ear, that raw little flower rising up from the bedclothes. There, there. Her tenderness was breathtaking. I could feel it—even from outside the room, even in my treetop perch—making everything disappear. There goes the world. There goes the house. Poof. There goes your bed and your body, too. There go thoughts. His eyes fluttered a few times, closed. The wind gave up rustling the trees. The sky clouded over. When Paul’s mouth opened up and he was asleep, Patra carefully stood, extracted the cup from his hands, and left the room.
She came back and undressed him as he slept. I watched her uncoil his legs from his pants and put him in a diaper.
His soft belly puckered beneath the plastic waistband. I’d never seen him in a diaper before. I don’t know why that got to me, but up came a curl of saliva in my throat—something I didn’t expect, a liquid claw—and as it did, the black cat pounced to the inner windowsill. Nonchalantly, not even looking out at me, licking one paw. Still. I was startled, so I left.
I thought that would be it till Tuesday because of Memorial Day weekend. But the next morning, I was sitting on the roof of the shed, reading a People magazine I’d stolen from the school secretary’s trash, when I saw Patra’s blue Honda coming up my parents’ road. The whole woods droned with motors—weekenders on the lake testing their speedboats—so I didn’t hear the car until it was halfway up the sumac trail. Popping gravel and snagging trees.
I came down from the roof in a single leap, just as the dogs started getting nervous, hauling their chains from the dirt and peering down the road. Shhh, I told them. I trotted a little way through the dense corridor of sumac and then stopped Patra’s car by patting it softly on the hood.
“Linda! Careful!” She rolled down her window and leaned out.
Patra didn’t look at all like herself. Her lips were pink as earthworms under rocks, wrinkling up under lipstick. Blush glittered on her cheeks, giving her the look of the Karens, of girls despising themselves in mirrors—scratching open pimples, then sealing up the wounds with foundation. She looked both older and younger at once. A kid dressing up, or a middle-aged lady trying too hard to look young.
“Listen,” she went on. “I didn’t have your mom’s number. I went through the whole house this morning, but couldn’t remember where I wrote it down. The thing is Leo’s coming today. Paul and I were planning to meet his plane in Duluth. We were going to drive there together, but Paul’s—”
“But Paul’s—” I wanted to help her out. I wanted, by instinct, to finish the sentences that gave her trouble. To ease her load, to do her dirty work. “Paul’s—”
“Fine. He’s sleeping in. He’s actually still at home—”
“Alone?” That made her eyes change, a gleam coming over them.
“Come with me,” she begged. “Just for the day. Just while I’m away, stay with him.”
I had a take-home trig test to finish, a big blowndown branch I’d promised to chop up. My dad was on the lake even now catching walleye I would need to clean before nightfall. I knew, though, that I’d do what Patra asked. Here she was, after all, gripping the wheel of her car so tight her veins popped up in her hands. From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother coming around the hilltop path where she’d been hanging laundry. I told Patra, “Hold on.”
“I can come in, talk to your mom.” She turned off the engine, started to open the door. I could hear the dogs’ chains rumbling across the dirt, the flap-flap of the tarp on the front door in the wind.
“Hold on!” I told her. I must have yelled, because she put two hands up. In surrender.
“Okay.”
I saw my mother squint over at the car, once, before she went inside.
I followed her in.
*
The sunlit room swirled with sooty dust. My mother was folding laundry on the kitchen table, a great pile of sun-crisp clothes in a crazy jumble. “That the girl from across the lake? The one you’ve been spending so much time with?” She had a proppedup look on her face, hopeful and suspicious both. Her long dark hair latched to the staticky sheets as she folded rectangles in half, then in half again.
“Yeah.”
She nodded, not meeting my eyes. For years she’d said she wanted me to be more like other kids my age. She’d always told my dad that she wanted me to spend less time on the shed, have more regular girl experiences. So here I was, satisfying her. She said: “She’s nice then?” But she meant: She’s not from around here, right? Because at the same time, I think, my mother always wanted me to have loftier ambitions than the local girls, to be just a little superior to them.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Then have fun.” She went to the shelf over the sink, opened an old mason jar, fingered four crumpled dollar bills from her stash. She wrinkled her nose at me when I waved her away. “I’m serious.”
“Mom—” The bills felt soft as cloth in my hand. They didn’t feel like money.
“It’s important.” She was smiling knowingly now.
I had a flutter in the back of my throat. A warning. “What is?”
“Having a little adventure.”