Dellarobia said, “Just didn’t love him.” She nodded with each word, her full sympathy stretched across that sentence.

“Well,” Hester said, “I didn’t know if I did. We’d hardly said words, he was so standoffish. I didn’t know if I would love him or if I wouldn’t.”

Dellarobia laughed a little. “Sounds like you’d had more than words. If you were cooking a little bun in the oven while he was away.”

“No.”

“No, you weren’t pregnant?”

“No, we hadn’t been together.”

“So how does that happen, exactly?”

Over the next mile or so of silence, Dellarobia replayed the words, studied them out, and wished she could eat those last ones. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re saying you were pregnant, and the baby wasn’t Bear’s.”

Another mile came and went, with Dellarobia feeling very strange at the helm of this woman-stuff car, as if the road might abruptly lift them into some other plane. Maybe she should have gone to look at the wood splitter. She was not sure she was ready to hear about Hester’s wild side, Hester’s other life. She must have been a pistol, with that flair of hers, those handmade fashion statements and whirlwind energy. Bear must have been smitten. A bright-eyed girl from a dilapidated trailer on the back side of a mountain. A man with a house and a farm. What Dellarobia was not ready for, she realized then, was Hester’s legitimate claim on her sympathies. Just going on the basics, a person would think she and Hester had lived the same story line.

“Did you ever find out who adopted it or anything?” she brought herself to ask quietly. “This baby, was it a boy or girl?”

“A boy.”

“Does Bear know?”

“Just that it happened. He said we’d marry if there was nary a word said of it. So that’s how it is. The ones that adopted him never knew who I was, I don’t think. If they did, they took it to their grave.”

“All this time. Gosh. He’d be, what, like in his thirties now?”

“There was a home for unwed girls in Knoxville.”

“You went there?”

“I should have. Mommy said I ought to go away, but I was pigheaded and stayed with my cousin Mary in Henshaw and gave the baby up to some church folks over there. I was thinking of myself. Staying near friends and Mommy and all.”

“And some fellow, whoever he was. The father.”

“He’s long gone. Dead.”

“I’m sorry. So you gave up the baby in Henshaw.”

“See, I wasn’t thinking. A city would have been the thing. Hereabouts you never know how something will keep turning up.”

“Isn’t that the truth. I’ve seen suits of clothes my mother made twenty years ago hanging on the rack at Second Time Around. I always feel kind of proud, you know? That they’re that well made.” She glanced at Hester and shut off her babble. The woman was miserable.

“Hester, are you okay?” she asked after a minute. “Have you seen him? I mean, is he around? Does he know who you are?”

She shook her head deliberately. “He doesn’t, nor Bear. They can’t any of them know. And I can’t do a thing in this wide world but live with it.”

Dellarobia glanced in the rearview again. Cordie was still asleep. A ten-mile nap, and out poured this. When they rounded the bend and Hester’s mailbox came into view, Dellarobia exhaled a deep relief. They were finished. End of story.

“A person could think about doing away with herself,” Hester said. “I’d not tell you any of this, except I fear for you. You make your bed, but you can’t always keep lying in it. Getting older is no help, Dellarobia. You might forget whether you took your pressure pill ten minutes ago. But there’s your regrets of thirty year ago, still just sitting there. A-looking you in the eye.”

“I don’t even know what you’re telling me, Hester. It’s a lot to take in. You had a son. You did your best. I’m sure he’s had a good life somewhere.”

She turned into the driveway, bypassing the mailbox and the dreadful swan planter, a remembrance of unkindnesses past. The ties that bind, Dellarobia thought, and follow us to the sweet by and by. But there stood Roy and Charlie waiting in the yard, the winter-killed flower beds, the house with its empty upstairs windows, work to be done, disagreements settled. Not such a terrible bed for Hester to lie in, surely. And then it hit, with such unexpected clarity she slammed the brakes.

“Oh, dear God, Hester. It’s Bobby.”

14

Perfect Female

At some unmeasured moment the temperature fell through the floor and the rain turned crystalline, descending noiselessly in the dark and stunning Dellarobia the following morning when she let Roy out the front door. Snow. Roy bounded wolfishly through the white deep, nosing into drifts, leaving a tangled line of tracks as he hurried to put his small yellow tags on all of the yard’s most notable points. The dog version of Post-its.

The cedars in the Cooks’ front yard were flocked with white, and their holly tree was enveloped in ice, giving the effect of a commemorative Christmas plate. The big maple on the property line was less enchanting as it dropped limbs onto the driveway at steady intervals, crash, crash, like an angry drunk. Needless to say, school was canceled. Dovey called around eight to report she hadn’t even gotten halfway to Cash Club before she had to turn around. The way she described the cars sliding around on Highway 7 sounded like a slow-motion automotive ballet.

“This is so wack!” Dovey said. “Who ever heard of a winter like this?”

“Nobody,” Dellarobia replied.

She couldn’t stay away from the front window. Everything looked so clean and transformed, so fresh-start. All ramshackle aspects of the neighborhood’s houses and barns had disappeared under white roofs against white fields. The mailbox sported a white toupee. Icicles fringed their entire roofline, the massive one down at the end unfortunately suggesting a backed-up gutter. It was three feet long and curved slightly outward like a movie villain’s sword, just dangling. The icicle of Damocles. “Don’t you walk under that thing,” she warned Preston.

From the couch Preston shot back a look that said, No chance. He and Cordie were snuggled under blankets in their pajamas, watching cartoons. They’d waited all winter for this. A snow day was not to be wasted.