"Okay, now you're telling me what, he's got dreadlocks?"
"No. Like Bob Marley's cute brother that avoided substance abuse and got an education. Oh, shoot, there's Cub on his way out to work. I've gotta go."
"Are you telling him?"
"You mean Cub? Right now, no. He runs happiest on a short tether. I'll tell him when he gets home from work."
Cub had spotted her from the front door and was motioning for her to come in the house. Dellarobia waved back and pointed at the phone. "It's Dovey," she yelled. "She's got a personal emergency. I'll be there in a jif. Is Cordie in the high chair?"
"Playpen," he said, tucking in his shirttails as he headed for the truck. "They've got gravel deliveries lined up all day. I won't be back any earlier than five."
"I'll personal emergency you," Dovey hissed.
"Sorry."
"You're the one with the international man of mystery coming to supper. Possibly the leader of the free world."
"Yeah, I better get cracking," Dellarobia said. "My house looks like the toxic waste dump of the free world."
"Hey," Dovey said. "You all are just like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner!"
"What do you mean?"
"You know, that old movie. Where the white girl brings home her boyfriend and her parents freak out because he turns out to be Sidney Poitier."
"Gosh, that rings a bell. Sidney Poitier." Dellarobia felt deranged, losing familiar names and movie titles. She used to check out movies from the library by the half dozen, along with every book that wasn't nailed down. The library was just little, a storefront in Feathertown with a permanent sheen of dust, now closed, but it used to gather in people of all types. Old guys paging through maritime picture books, housewives checking out romances and household fix-up guides. As a child she loved watching the different kinds of adults, imparting their hints of the many options. Now she moved only among people related by blood or faith, or else, as at the grocery, mute.
Dovey wouldn't give up on her theatrical revelation. "You have to have seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. They do these, like, Hepburnathons on Turner."
"With opening titles and ending credits, I bet," Dellarobia said. "I vaguely remember those."
"What, you can't stay awake to the end of a movie?"
Dellarobia inhaled, but no words came. Dovey's television, like Dovey's everything, answered only to Dovey. Even as close as they were, how could she really understand a household where information had to be absorbed like shrapnel: movie, sitcom, ultimate wrestling, repeat. Dellarobia turned her face up to the sky, feeling tears, blinking them down. If her unity with Dovey wasn't real, what did she have?
"I don't get out much anymore," she said after a moment.
"Listen, sweet pea, you don't need to. Sounds like the world is beating a path to your door."
At ten minutes till six, Dellarobia felt embarrassed by everything in her kitchen. The unbreakable Corelle plates, the cheap unmatched table and chairs, the sheen of snot and applesauce she imagined was still detectable on every surface, despite a day of scrubbing. The washer-dryer combo in the little niche, the laundry piled high behind the flimsy louvered doors. Cub's NASCAR lunch cooler on the counter where he'd flung it down, and the husband himself for that matter, with his too-long hair and slumped posture and his failure even to see that there was anything to be embarrassed about. Sitting at the table reading the sports page of the Courier, he looked like a "before" picture. But this was it; she'd married him in haste, and this was all the "after" there appeared to be.
"Where'd that newspaper come from?" she snapped, hearing from herself the same voice she'd used earlier today when she caught Cordie with pennies in her mouth.
Cub didn't look up. "Mom's."
So she couldn't subscribe to the paper, but he could read his mother's. "For goodness' sakes, you could change your shirt, if you're not going to take a shower."
"I done a full day's shift for once, honey. We ought to be praising the Lord."
"Thank you, Jesus, and you smell like it," she said under her breath, actually hating how she felt. She was no better than Hester, treating him like this. She could hardly blame him for reacting to the circumstances she'd just thrown in his face, telling him about the morning's strange encounter and invitation. He'd taken it all in benignly, seeming puzzled but not suspicious, as some men would be if their wives struck up relationships with passing strangers. She'd told Cub this man was older, and that he was black, possibly even a foreigner, thinking this might head off embarrassing surprises. Maybe Cub believed those traits took a man out of the running in some way, so that jealousy wasn't an issue. Should it have been? Dellarobia wanted to weep, for her nervousness. She wished she had seen that movie Dovey told her about. Maybe she'd know how to act. She started to ask Cub to set the table, but thought better of it. At least she could organize things such that Mr. Byron would not get the SpongeBob glass.
If Mr. Byron showed up at all. That question was also starting to rack her nerves, as the man had seemingly vanished. She'd kept an eye out the back window all morning but never did see him come back down through the pasture. She had thought he would stop back in just to say whatever he would say--"Thanks, great butterflies, see you later." By midafternoon she figured he had come and gone, but when she checked out front, the VW still sat there with the big curved smile on its rear end, orange as ever. Something must have happened to him. She could imagine the possibilities: he'd lost the trail, he'd fallen, broken an ankle. He wasn't a country person, anyone could see that.
She towel-dried the macaroni pot and kneeled to put it away, dodging Cordie, who staggered into the kitchen with the green baby blanket over her head. Cub leaned over to scoop her up and squash the happy, squealing bundle of her onto his lap.
"What's in this old bunch of rags?" he asked, jostling her from side to side, eliciting peals of giggles. Half the time Cub didn't seem to recall he'd fathered children, and then there was this, the fact of the matter. They were the apple of his eye. "Honey, have you seen the baby anywhere?" he asked.
"Not for weeks and weeks," Dellarobia replied.
"Do you reckon we ought to throw these old rags in the garbage?" He lifted the green fuzzy bundle over his head, invoking loud hysteria that a stranger might take for anguish, but Dellarobia knew better. Cordie loved disappearing. Which was funny, because not that long ago, Preston could throw that blanket over a toy she was crawling after and Cordie would sit up and howl with despair at its sudden disappearance. She didn't know to look under the blanket, and Preston couldn't resist repeating the experiment, amazed at his sister's conviction that unseen things did not exist. Some time between then and now, Cordie had conquered the biggest truth in the world.
"I ought to go on and feed the kids," Dellarobia said. "I mean, look, it's getting dark. What could a person do outside on a mountain all day?"
Cub set his daughter's bare feet on the linoleum, and off she flew to the living room. "Whatever it was," he said, "I'm sure we'll hear all about it."
"You don't sound thrilled."
"Since when do we grab people off the street into our home to feed them supper?"
Well, here it comes after all, she thought. Leave it to Cub to take a full sixty minutes to realize he was mad. "I guess since we decided to behave like Christians," she said. "Why, what were you planning for tonight, to watch ADHD TV like always?"
Cub loudly exhaled his disgust and went back to his sports page. It wasn't kind, the attention-deficit remark. Cub had barely followed the thread of high school. But it drove her nuts the way he thumbed the remote and trolled the channels from News to Spike to Comedy to Shopping. What was the use of so many channels? So often, some crazy thing would pique her on the fly-by: a woman swimming alone across an ocean, or a blind couple taking in a multitude of foundling babies. But she would have to snatch the clicker from Cub and sit on it, if she wanted enough time to connect the dots.
She was dying for a smoke, but didn't want to hear wh
at she'd hear from Cub if she stepped out on the porch right now. Instead she checked the oven and yelled for the kids, thinking it best to go ahead and put Cordie in the high chair while she finished setting the table. Preston came obediently when called, shepherding Cordelia into the kitchen and struggling to pick her up, as if he might be able to lift her into the high chair. His desire to be helpful was boundless. Just like Roy and Charlie, she thought. My son has the personality of a border collie. She moved quickly to take Cordie.
"Honey, you can't pick up your sister. She weighs half as much as you do."
"You could get a hernia," Cub offered from behind the newspaper.
She had hoped to feed the kids much earlier and put them in front of the TV while the guest was here. Mr. Byron might not be accustomed to the hullaballoo of the toddler dining experience. But Preston had caught wind of the plan and would have none of it, even when she tried coaxing him with dessert, a no-bake gelatin and cookie thing the kids loved. Preston was no dessert-first man, and he wasn't easy to bribe. If a mysterious stranger had come to town, he was calling dibs.
"I'll be the lookout," he declared now, glancing from the back door to the front, then to his mother. "Which way will he come?"
"I don't know, I guess he's still up the mountain. Cub, do you think we should send out a search party? He's been up there since eight o'clock this morning."
"Lucky for him it's not raining pitchforks," Cub said tersely.
"Not at the moment, for a blessed change," she agreed. Cub folded his newspaper but made no other concession to her sense of this occasion, which would be a disaster if he planned to sulk. She needed his cooperation. "He's a visitor in our town," she said quietly, "not just some homeless person off the road. And anyway, what if he was? Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. That's the Bible."
Cub gave her a penitent look. The resemblance between him and Preston sometimes knocked the wind out of her.
"He came all this way to see our special blessing up there," she offered carefully. "I thought maybe I could tell him some things about the butterflies. Since he's interested."
"You could," Cub said. "That's true." She'd been bending Cub's ear with everything she'd read on Wikipedia about the monarch butterflies. He would probably be happy to take the night off and let someone else take a shift.
A knock at the front door made them all jump. The whole family was wound up tight, even the kids. She would bet money on Cordie setting up a wail, just from the stress. Dellarobia whipped off her apron and scurried to get the door.
"Hello! Welcome to our home!" she said, sounding to herself like a Stepford wife. She led him to the kitchen and introduced him to Cub and the children, then grabbed some potholders and dived for the oven to desist with humiliating herself. She had changed out of her mom clothes into a pink knit tunic and leggings and hoop earrings, and now that felt wrong too. She was overdressed. Mr. Byron asked if he could use their facilities to freshen up.
"You certainly may. Of course! You've been out in the elements all day. Preston, honey, could you show Mr. Byron where it is?" She knelt to peer into the oven. Her original plan was meat loaf, but then she'd panicked: What if he was a vegetarian? It wasn't unheard of, especially among those from other lands. Did sensible homemakers have a plan for the complete-stranger dinner party? She'd decided finally on a macaroni and tuna casserole, a slightly fancy recipe that called for a can of shoestring potatoes and two cans of French-cut green beans. That seemed safe. He surely wasn't French.
Preston leaped from his chair when called upon to help the guest, but then took two sideways steps toward his mother and whispered in her ear: "What's facilities?"
She whispered back, "The bathroom."
Preston nodded and soldiered forth, with the towering stranger behind him. Dellarobia noticed that his hiking boots looked expensive but the rest of his clothes were fairly ordinary--a well-worn jacket, blue corduroy shirt, and jeans. If you could call a thirty-eight-inch inseam ordinary. He would have to cruise the extra-tall shopping lanes, that's for certain. Or his wife would, if applicable. Dellarobia set the casserole on the table and spooned some of the soft, cheesy macaroni into Cordelia's bowl, blowing to cool it. Cordie had a spoon in each hand and was beating the tray of her high chair, eerily like a heavy metal drummer, throwing her fuzzy head to the beat. When Preston returned to the kitchen he gave his sister the once-over and flung his mother a wide-eyed glance: Please tell me I was never that age. But at least she wasn't wailing. Cub got the pitcher of sweet tea out of the fridge as she'd asked, and he wasn't wailing either. So far, so good. When the guest returned and everyone was seated, Cub said the blessing: "Father we thank you for this food and fellowship amen." She noticed Mr. Byron didn't close his eyes for the prayer, either. They had that in common.
"So, Mr. Byron, tell us about yourself," Cub said.
The man held up one long, narrow hand like a traffic cop. "Please! Just Ovid. You will make me feel like an old man." An old mon.
"Of course," Dellarobia said, though she knew Cub would not attempt a name that sounded so much like olive or oblong. She might be loath to try it herself, though she'd been forward with him at the outset. Now she feared the Bob Marley lyrics in her head would burst out of her mouth. No woo-mon, no cry. "Except for you, Preston," she added. "You need to call him Mr. Byron."
Preston nodded, his fork poised halfway to his mouth.
"Well, sir," Cub asked, "what do you make of all that, up on our mountain?"
Ovid shook his head very slowly. He took a long drink of his iced tea. "I can hardly begin to tell you what I make of all that, up on your mountain."
"They're monarchs," Dellarobia told him.
Ovid looked at her a little oddly.
"The butterflies," she quickly explained. "Monarch butterflies. You wouldn't believe it, but they are the most amazing of all insects. They gather up like that."
The guest smiled broadly, appearing to understand now. "They do indeed. Gather up like that."
"I mean, not just here, this once. Every winter they come from all over the United States and even Canada I guess, and fly south for the winter, and gang up together in a bunch like that. Just millions. We saw pictures on the Internet, Preston and I. It's the same as what's up there, clusters of butterflies hanging on the trees and practically covering up whole forests. Can you picture it? I mean, of course you can picture it, you just saw them. But can you picture such a little flimsy thing making that long trip?"
"My wife's an expert," Cub said proudly. "She's the one that led us to find them up there in the first place."
Ovid nodded, listening and chewing thoughtfully. "I would like to hear about that," he said. She noticed he had tiny corkscrews of gray in his short-cropped hair, near the temples, and crinkly smile lines at the corners of his eyes.
She shook her head to fend off Cub's compliment, but was nowhere near finished with the subject. "They fly thousands of miles to go south, like birds do. The only insect capable of flying great distances and even over ocean. They can go a hundred miles in a single day. It's unbelievable. They hardly weigh more than a quarter, I bet."
"Not even half that, I would say," Ovid replied.
"Right. But here's the part you will not believe."
"Try me," he said.
"Usually, they go to Mexico." She set down her fork and leaned forward. "Millions of butterflies pile up in this one spot on top of a mountain in Mexico. Always the same one. I mean, why Mexico? What's so special about that one mountain?"
"Good question," Ovid replied.
"Well, I guess a few of them go to California," she said. "I'm not sure how that part works. But about, I think, ninety-nine percent of them normally wind up in Mexico." The visit from the Mexican family and their disaster darkened her mind, but she was not going to bring that up now. She would like just one beautiful thing to her name, with no downside. She pushed her hair behind her shoulders and beamed at the gu
est. "Year in and year out, they've been going to the same place I guess forever. Since God made them. And now for whatever reason, instead of going to Mexico it looks like they decided to come here. Here."
"This property's been in my dad's family for close to a hundred years," Cub said, as if that mattered in the slightest. Dellarobia took a bite of her supper, trying to be patient with her husband's view of things. Next he'd be bringing up the logging contract. Who knew, maybe Mr. Byron would be interested in man talk. She couldn't read him very well. She reached over and tried to wipe Cordie's face, but the wild child batted the napkin away, singing "nananana." The artistic temperament of the family. Dellarobia watched her daughter finger-paint with cheese sauce on the tray of her high chair, moving both hands in big circles. Landscape of a planet with two suns, by Cordelia Turnbow.
Everyone had stopped speaking for the moment. In the conversational pause Dellarobia heard muted applause from the living room, the TV no one had thought to turn off. It sounded like some dumb Spike thing, which the kids had no business watching. About once a week she threatened to cut off the cable, but they had a weird package with Bear and Hester that made it essentially free. Also Dellarobia doubted the family could live without it. It was like drugs. These companies mainlined you.
"They eat poison milkweed, too," Preston piped up. "Tell him that, Mama."
"That's right, they eat milkweed, which is toxic I guess. Not the butterflies, they don't have chewing mouthparts, they just go around drinking nectar from flowers. But when they go to lay their eggs, they lay them on a milkweed plant. So when the eggs hatch out as caterpillars, those babies will eat nothing but poison leaves."
Preston added breathlessly, "And when they, when they eat that and grow up, it turns the butterflies poison, too. So nothing will come along and eat them!"
"Poisonous or distasteful to birds," Dellarobia corroborated, quoting from memory.
Ovid crossed his arms over his chest and made a face that said, Very impressed, nodding admiringly at Preston. "What a smart young fellow. A little bird tells me"--he circled his finger in the air, then pointed it right at Preston--"that you are a scientist."