“It’s what I do,” said Owen, smiling back at her. “It’s what we both do.”
My husband is pretty great, thought Lucy, for the first time in a long time. There weren’t a lot of men who could handle Wyatt. Certainly not many who could do it as kindly and creatively as Owen did. There was a statistic that floated around on the message boards online, about how many parents of special-needs kids end up divorced, and the percentage was truly staggering. Lucy didn’t know if it was fair to blame it on the kids’ fathers being assholes, but in her gut, well, she thought it was probably true. Owen is sort of amazing, Lucy thought. So why did I let myself fall in love with somebody else?
*
Gordon was upstairs in his office, lying on the couch with his eyes closed. He was listening to a live police-radio stream from his laptop. It was his newest hobby.
Gordon had to use a considerable amount of self-control to reserve his Simka-viewing for late nights only, during those all-too-frequent times when he couldn’t fall asleep. He’d read about the police-radio feeds and was trying to use them as a substitute, and while they didn’t give him goose bumps—quite the opposite, really—they were pretty interesting. He liked to listen to Phoenix and Chicago, depending on what sort of people he was in the mood to hear getting arrested. Sometimes he’d mix it up and listen to Los Angeles. Still, it was weak methadone compared to the heroin that was Simka.
Rocco grabbed his black-socked foot and squeezed it.
“What?” Gordon said. He pulled off his earphones.
“Maria wants to talk to someone.”
“Go get your mom.”
“Mom said she doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“Well, I don’t want to be disturbed either,” said Gordon. He put his earphones back on. “Tell Maria your mother will talk to her later.”
“Okay,” said Rocco.
Rocco just stood at the foot of the couch, looking at his father.
“Fang ate a chicken.”
Gordon pulled off his earphones again. “What?”
“Fang ate a chicken inside the church.”
“Inside the—why was Fang inside a church?”
“You told me I could bring him to get baptized, remember?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s a swear, Dad,” said Rocco. “If it’s not at church, it’s a swear.”
Gordon walked down the main staircase and found Maria standing in the entry hall and wringing her hands. The front door was wide open, and Fang was outside, tied to the antique lawn jockey Gordon had been given a few years back by a prominent senator from Alabama. Fang was hunched over and retching.
“Ees not a good dog,” Maria said when she saw Gordon. “I tol’ Miss Kelly, I can’ control the dog.”
“You told her you can or you can’t?”
“I can’ no. I can’ no,” said Maria, shaking her head emphatically. “So, no my faul’.”
Gordon rubbed his forehead with his hand. “So, let me get this straight. Fang ate somebody’s chicken?”
“Eet attack, Mr. Allen. Eet attack the chicken.”
“Whose chicken was it?”
“A leetle boy. Kind of a”—and here Maria did some sort of spastic flapping movements with her hands to indicate…what? A disability of some sort? Epilepsy? Gordon couldn’t really understand—“a boy weet som pro’lems. You know, som reel pro’lems.”
Oh, wonderful, Gordon thought. This is just great.
*
It was dark before Susan was able to leave St. Andrews, and she was both physically and emotionally exhausted. She and Evelyn Bullard and a handful of old ladies from the garden committee had spent the afternoon cleaning up the feathers and the blood, along with some dog diarrhea and what Susan was convinced was a llama shit. The llama shit was on the brand-new red carpet in the vestibule, right in plain sight, an enormous dump that Claire had clearly ignored and left for someone else to deal with.
Colleen and Arlen Lowell had volunteered to catch the two surviving chickens, which were perched on the rafters, terrified. After two hours with a stepstool and a broomstick and one of those gentle green plastic rakes and an old sheet, they’d gotten them safely into a cat carrier. The Lowells seem really happy together, Susan found herself thinking as Colleen and Arlen laughed and joked and chased the two scared chickens around the church. It would be nice to be that happy.
Arlen told Susan they would drop the bloody chicken off at the vet (“The bill will be our treat”), and they’d bring the other one back to the McIntires’ house the following day, once Wyatt was safely at school. They didn’t want to retraumatize him.
“Do you think they’re going to want the carcass?” Colleen asked Susan.
“Why on earth would they want the carcass?” Susan asked.
Colleen wrinkled her nose and said, “To bury it?”
“I don’t know,” said Susan. She sighed a huge sigh. “I don’t understand people with chickens.”
“Well, we’ll put it in our trunk just in case,” said Arlen.
Once everything was clean, and the church doors were locked, and even poor Evelyn Bullard had gone home to her house filled with nobody, Susan remembered she still had to deal with the three baby Nubian goats.
The goats had spent the day behind the church, tied to a tree, gorging on the bushes and the grass, and they were covered in mud. Susan suspected they’d eaten too much, but she didn’t have the energy to worry about it. She untied them and led them across the graveyard to the parking lot.
She and Rowan had traded cars. Rowan took Charlotte and the boys out for pizza and a movie in the minivan, and Susan had Rowan’s Cherokee for the goats. She heaved the muddy goats into the back through the window one by one, wishing she had some help. Then she got behind the wheel, turned on her lights, and headed for the cheese lady’s house.
*
Later, after Owen and Lucy dried their son off with towels warmed in the dryer, and let him watch an hour of Pocoyo, and gave him back scratches and sang him songs, and listened to the telling and retelling of what they would come to refer to as “The Tale of the Death of Fat Black” approximately three thousand times, Wyatt finally fell asleep.
Owen came into the bedroom. Lucy was sitting on the bed, brushing her hair.
“That,” said Lucy, “is why I didn’t want to bring three chickens to church.”
“You foresaw this?” said Owen.
“I said one chicken. I’m just saying, I thought bringing more than one was going to cause a problem.”
“So you’re implying you foresaw this,” said Owen. “You foresaw carnage, and Wyatt yelling Fat Black at the top of his lungs? While the entire town, including one of the four black people in Beekman, the only one who could conceivably be described as fat, looked on?”
Lucy smiled a small smile, the first one in what felt like days, and then she asked, “Just out of curiosity, why did you bring Fat Black?”
“He walked into the box first,” said Owen. “Just out of curiosity, why did you name a chicken Fat Black?”
“I also named one Fat White and one Fat Red. It’s not racist,” said Lucy. “It might be fat-ist. You try naming nineteen chickens.”