band around his plump little arm. And his knuckles. Little dimples. Everything perfect.”
Valley looks at the two of them, Joey’s body merging into her mother’s flowered dress.
“And he smells so good. Aah. You smelled so good I thought I’d go wild. Your scent was all over your blankets, and when I went to put them in the washer, I’d stand there and grieve that I was about to wash you away. I had to go cuddle you as soon as I’d done it.”
Valley can’t imagine sticking her face in peed-on baby blankets. Face it—whatever it is that makes women go ape over babies and cancel their lives for slavery to poop and snot, she doesn’t have it.
Joey falls asleep with the bottle in his mouth. Her mother removes it and gets up from the rocker, his head cradled in her elbow and his bottom in her other palm. “Sit down here, Valley. You take him. He’s fine now.” She motions to the chair with her head.
Valley seats herself in the chair and takes Joey back. He stays asleep, though during the switch his head lolls dangerously to one side.
“That’s right. There.” Her mother props Joey’s head between Valley’s small breast and her arm. Valley tenses so his head won’t move. “Perfect.” Her mother stands back and regards the two of them with her head cocked to one side.
Valley’s arm aches, but she doesn’t move.
“Now rock, lamb. Relax. It feels good. Enjoy the motion.”
Valley pushes off with her toe.
“You should be fine now. Call me back if you need me.”
Valley wishes her mother would stay. She doesn’t want to be alone with Joey. Doesn’t trust herself. But now that Joey is sleeping, her mother will be suspicious if she asks her to stay. She can’t risk that.
The Galaxy disappears down the road, and Valley is left with Joey and the creaking rocker. She looks down at the sleeping child. How long had her Home Ec teacher said a baby could go without oxygen before brain damage? Was it five minutes? Fifteen? Longer for babies than for adults? How long had Joey gone without breathing? Valley mentally retraces her steps once it got silent—to the living room, to the phone. She accounts for the time it takes to dial the two calls, allows herself some time to think. It can’t have been that long. Not fifteen minutes.
Joey looks so peaceful, lying in her arms. The rocker creaks and Valley hears a rhyme.
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn;
The sheep’s in the meadow,
The cow’s in the corn.
Where’s the little boy that looks after the sheep?
He’s under Sebastian, fast asleep.
CHAPTER 4
R ose drives home in a daze, choosing to take the long way around. She can feel Joey’s plump calf in the hollow of her palm and his hot breath on her neck. His body had grown weightier as he’d relaxed, like in Valley’s infancy when the two of them had napped together. Valley nursed, then dropped off to sleep in Rose’s arms. Rose dozed, too, in a blissful half sleep, wakened by Valley’s slightest movement. Those were the days. She knew exactly where Valley was every minute.
Farmland stretches out for miles on either side of the roadway. The fields, usually nappy with soybean plants by the second week in June, are bogs of puddles. Rose wonders if the seeds have rotted in the ground. Her tires zhush through a puddle, throwing water onto the wild grapevine growing over the roadside fence posts. The stench of hen manure from Gabriel’s turkey farm is stronger downwind. The sky arches overhead in a blue dome, its clouds unaffected by the humidity that rises from the swampy earth like bad breath.
The summer Valley was conceived was different—hot but not humid. The water in Kaiser Lake was silky and warm; the perfume of lilac and honeysuckle hung in the air. Dishes clinked on screen porches around the lake as people lingered late over coffee and dessert, listening to the hiss of locusts. On such a night, Rose thinks, no one should be held responsible for what happened. And though she’d been terrified at the time, Valley was a keeper. If a baby was the punishment for her sin, she should sin more often. It was no wonder she couldn’t confess it.
Rose sees a woman standing in the road ahead, waving her arms frantically. She knows it’s Helen from the long legs and hair even before she’s close enough to see her features. Rose brakes and pulls up next to her friend. “I thought you’d be at work.”
“My car’s in the garage, so I’m walking home for lunch. Bethany’s home alone.”
Rose has never seen Helen eat anything but yogurt, standing at the fridge in the Laundromat office—unless you count the sunflower seeds she bakes to chew on when she can’t smoke. To Rose, yogurt isn’t lunch. Certainly nothing to walk home for. But that’s why Helen has pretty thighs and hers are all mottled.
“Get in. I’ll drive you. I meant to call you anyway. I may be gone for a few days—on a church retreat—so don’t worry if you can’t reach me.” She’s not really leaving home, but if she admits to secluding herself, Helen will think she’s as crazy as the old woman robbing the church Dumpster.
Helen plants her tidy hips on the seat. “Oh, too bad. Just when Rob’s arrived. Have you seen him yet? He stopped into the laundry with his stuff for me to wash, and guess what? He recognized me!” Rose glances at her. Helen looks great in the sleeveless black tank she’s wearing with her jeans. At times like this, Rose can’t think what she likes about Helen. They wouldn’t be friends if they hadn’t been sitting together pregnant in Dr. Burns’s office that year. Eleven months after she married Carl, Helen delivered Bethany and left the hospital wearing her jeans—which, at the moment, seems like a pretty good reason to hate her.
“He said he’d know my hair anywhere,” Helen brags. Her hair really is pretty, but it’s sickening how she relishes every little detail like Joanie Cranford. Helen wastes what little money she has on fancy botanical shampoos so her hair smells of windfall apples one day, ripe peaches the next.
“He called me Helen Dudley,” Helen prattles on. “Maybe I should have changed my name back when Carl left, but after all those years of being called Milk Dud and Dudley-Do-Wrong, I was glad enough to be rid of it. He hadn’t heard I’d married. He says he remembers the name Slezac, but only the name—he couldn’t put a face to Carl. When you’re not in the same class you don’t really know each other. Anyway, he was sorry to hear about my divorce.”
“Is he married?” The question comes out in a little half voice, and Rose clears her throat to cover, as if she’s fighting a frog.
“He didn’t say so.” Helen prides herself on being the first to know the town gossip, and Rose eggs her on with a few more questions. “There’s nobody with him,” Helen says. “No woman, I mean. He’s got some kid along, though.”
Rose lets that sink in. “What do you mean kid?”
“Just some boy.” To Helen it’s a toss-off. “You know. Sixteen, maybe.”
“Oooh, Bethany’s age,” Rose says, filling her voice with innuendo. Really she’s worried that Valley has a half brother. What if he looks like Valley?
“You don’t really think—” Helen says, though she’s obviously conjuring a romance for Bethany. “Maybe I should invite them over. You know, for a friendly dinner.”
Rose pictures the TV dinners she’s seen Helen stack neatly in her grocery cart, filing each item as if she’s lining up decimal points after counting the Laundromat’s change. “It might be kind of obvious,” Rose says, but when has Helen ever been afraid of being obvious?
Helen lights a cigarette and dangles her right hand out the open window. “If I’m not obvious, Bethany won’t get it. I’ve never seen such a backward child. She never brings a soul home with her.”
“Maybe she needs time alone.