“Sorry.” Charlie giggled.
Even setting aside the miraculous identity of your guest, it was very strange to witness your family perform itself for an outsider. You couldn’t remember the last time a visitor had come to Zion’s Pastures. A couple of years before, your mother had cured the grandfather clock of its mildew infestation by setting it for two days in the front yard. “Just needs a little sunlight to heal,” she had explained. A seventeen-year-old boy, unkissed, could be forgiven for already beginning to conceive of Rebekkah like that healing sun upon his whole lonesome, mildewed life at Zion’s Pastures.
“So how you liking it?” Pa said. “School going okay so far this year?”
“It’s good. I sure miss your art class.” You noticed that as she spoke she gestured with her left hand, but kept the other lying there, unbudging in the darkness.
“You know,” Rebekkah said. “All this star talk is reminding me of that song. They call me on and on across the universe—”
All four of you tuneless Lovings lay there, stunned, as Rebekkah sang a line of that Beatles tune.
“Crikey,” Charlie said.
“Beautiful.” Pa whistled. “Got some serious pipes on you, good Lord.”
“I don’t know about that,” Rebekkah said. “I just like to sing sometimes.”
After a time, Pa resumed his astronomy lesson. “Of course you know that falling stars is not really accurate. What you are looking at are just minor asteroids burning up in the atmosphere, but it is remarkable…” You were no longer listening. Because your hand understood that it didn’t have forever. And so, in one brave and reckless act, your hand called upon the support of wrist and forearm. It crouched low, and then it sprang. And there would perhaps never be a joy as acute as the joy of Rebekkah’s downy, warm-soft fingers when they did not stray from the point of contact. Your hands remained there, for whole seconds, their backsides pressed together, turning red hot, generating the atomic material of the future. But your hand was no fool. It understood that the snakeskin had been a kind of sign; if you lingered too long, the delicate thing would crumble.
A half-hour later, you were all sauntering back up the dirt road, the weak flicker of your cheap flashlights casting skittish halos over dust and cacti. “Goodness. It’s already nine thirty,” Ma told Rebekkah. “Probably close to your curfew, no?”
“Huh,” she said. “I guess.”
“Well, then, we’d best get you home.”
“We’d best,” Rebekkah said, and Ma nodded, walking ahead to set a swifter pace. For just a second, you turned to look at Rebekkah. The moon was rising now, and you watched as the thinness of her lips bent into a smile. You smiled in reply. But you were a boy who had developed a nearly anaphylactic aversion to prolonged eye contact, and you looked away, gaped up awkwardly at the sky: a poor decision. Before you could understand what had happened, the intense penny smell of blood had already filled your nose. Your boot toe had caught a rock, sent you sprawling on the path.
“Woot!” your brother hollered. “There he goes again!”
“Oliver!” Ma yelped. “Your nose!”
“It’s fine,” you said.
“It’s not. It’s bleeding.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Nothing? Why are you smiling?”
“I don’t know.”
As you sat up, you watched your brother hopping from foot to foot, doing what he did with your frequent teenage-klutzy tumbles, turning it into some slapstick act for his entertainment. “I can’t believe it! Your best spill yet! Gold medal! Classic!”
“Oh my God,” Rebekkah murmured.
“Keep it pinched,” your mother said. “Here, use one of the napkins. You need to lie down! Stay here and we’ll come pick you up with the car. Or, wait, Jed, what about the couch in your studio?”
“My studio?” Pa said, and paused. “Right. I guess come on then.”
The shame of this scene was not inconsiderable, but it was little next to the astonishment you now had to stifle. You were going to Pa’s studio? Your father’s so-called art studio was a tumbledown cabin, a half mile up the dirt road from the big house, and it was strictly off-limits to his family. And in the past few months, Pa himself often seemed off-limits, too. He occasionally dragged his body to the dinner table, but always his mind remained out there, latched behind a cabin door, in a hazy cloud of Pall Mall smoke and whiskey vapors. This latest absence was longer than his previous ones, but throughout your childhood Pa had disappeared to his painting shed most weekends. Like a controlled experiment to refute the old Texan belief in the direct relationship between perseverance and reward, Pa’s countless painting hours had never summed to anything very successful. He spurned the locally ubiquitous landscape art—those shattered canyons and Comanche dragoons in hot pursuit of their bison—that might have fetched him real money in favor of his “true work,” which amounted to artful knockoffs of a number of dead masters who piled the bright paint thickly. Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Munch, Chagall.
In his whole stymied, self-poisoning career, you had seen your father sell just a single painting. This was at the start of your freshman year, when Bliss Township threw its fund-raising jamboree on the school’s front lawn. Amid booths jammed with foil-wrapped brownies, tin-plated pies, and clunky granny needlepoints, Pa set up a stand to sell his students’ work. Of course, nearly all those bleeding watercolors and fingerprint-smudged charcoals sold at asking price—to the artists’ own parents. But, late into that Saturday afternoon, a single piece remained unsold. The same oil painting Pa had unveiled at your last Good Things Monday, his wind-whirled rendition of Bliss Township School, the mass of children out front just a bright yellow suggestion, the schoolhouse’s cupolas and cornices warping into the shapes of the jolly clouds above. For his own asking price, Pa had affixed a blue sticker that said, $250.
As the pies vanished from the booths, as the Bliss Township Marching Band began to fold away their gear, Pa’s painting still languished there, unpurchased. Your brother tugged at Ma and you to huddle with him behind the art booth. “We have to buy his painting,” Charlie said. “We have to!” Ma touched his cheek. “You are the sweetest boy in the world,” she told him. Not to be bested, you felt your pockets for your saved allowance, showing Ma twenty-four dollars. Charlie could contribute only six, and your mother had just eighty-five dollars in her pocketbook. She clutched the gathered money in her fist, worked a finger into one of her curls. “Wait here,” she said, and when she came back, five minutes later, she was smiling so widely you could see her back fillings.