“So I can learn about your home,” she finally said.

The man returned the paper with several words written under the telephone number: Reynaldo Delgado. Angangueo, Michoacán. The last name she’d forgotten, the town that was no more.

They all sat quietly for a long time. Dellarobia had ridden out prayer meetings aplenty, but had no idea what to say to a family that had lost their world, including the mountain under their feet and the butterflies of the air.

5

National Proportions

The man arrived in a Beetle. His car was in the long train of Monday-morning unfortunates stuck behind the school bus, whom Dellarobia now pitied only halfheartedly as she put Preston on the bus. Gunning their engines, weaving, all these drivers needed to settle down and accept their fate. “Late for work, sucks to be you!” she mouthed cheerfully at the drivers as the bus chuffed its brake-release sound and grumbled away at a snail’s pace. She made sure to wave at the square pane of glass that contained Preston’s small face like a picture frame.

She was a little mortified, then, when the orange VW pulled out of the line and onto the shoulder directly across from her. Had that guy seen her taunting him? She reached into her coat pocket to touch her phone, which was pointless. She could easily bolt the twenty paces to her front door, in a pinch. She watched an unbelievably tall, thin man get out of the small car, unfolding himself like a contractor’s ruler.

“I am looking for the Turnbow farm,” he said with a fascinating accent, tilting the words this way and that. Turn-bow, he’d said, as in “Turn around, take a bow.” She had the wildest urge to do that.

“I’m Dellarobia Turnbow,” she called back, but it came out too fast, a solid unbroken string of syllables that caused the man to laugh.

“Really,” he said. “All that?”

“Not even. I didn’t give you the middle and the maiden. Catie, Causey.”

“Well, then,” he said, crossing the road with great long strides to grasp her hand and shake it. “Ovid Byron, a crazy name as well. You might be the first to upstage that.”

Creezy neem . . . ope-stage dot—he sounded like a reggae singer. She took note of both names and tilted her neck to stare at the upshot of all that. She was accustomed to men of measure, but this one had a few inches even on the Turnbow men, and it went on from there. Tall, dark, and handsome, but extra tall, extra dark. Okay, extra all three. He was so many things, this Mr. Byron, that he constituted something of an audience, driving her to invent a performance on the spot.

“You’re named for poets. Ovid was that ancient one, right? And Lord Byron.” She was casting her net wide here, Honors English was a lot of water under the bridge, but his look said she’d nailed it. “Better than me—I’m named after a wreath made out of nature junk.” She made a little curtsy.

“That name again, please?”

“Dellarobia.” She ran a hand through her hair, for which the color of his car was a pretty good match: University of Tennessee orange. Maybe he was a UT fan, but she wouldn’t ask. He might just like the color, as arbitrarily as she’d been born with that hair. Which had yet to meet a comb that morning. She wore gray plaid pajamas under her coat, and unlaced boots. Meeting the bus each morning was a scramble that left her feeling punch-drunk.

Luckily, this guy seemed unobservant of the pj’s. He repeated her name carefully, dividing it in two: Della Robbia. He crinkled his brow in concentration, as if momentarily considering the possibilities. “Also an artist,” he declared. “I’m pretty sure of that, an Italian Renaissance painter. Della Robbia. Maybe a sculptor. Of the still life, I’m pretty sure. Nature junk, as you call it.”

“Shut the front door! Are you kidding me?”

“No. But I might be entirely wrong.” He laughed. “You should look into it, woman. It’s your name.”

The candor of this stranger took her breath away. Woman! And the idea of being named for an artist. A person could be reborn on the strength of that. It pounded in her head while she completed their outlandish conversation and waited for him to retrieve his camera and backpack from his car. She walked him around to the back and pointed out the High Road to the astonishing Ovid Byron, whose accent she finally placed. He sounded just like that crab character who sang “Under the Sea” in The Little Mermaid.

The minute he’d hiked out of sight, her impulse was to run to Hester’s and get on the computer. She’d never thought to Google her own name. She lit a cigarette instead, and confronted the sight of her back porch with its still life of muddy boots, cardboard boxes, and a miniature Big Wheels bike lying on its side, looking comatose. Cub would be leaving for work in ten minutes, Cordie would want breakfast. Dellarobia exercised the only option generally available to her in times of personal upheaval. She walked to the side of the house where she couldn’t be seen out a window, and dialed Dovey.

“Hold your horses, what’s his name again?” Dovey asked, after Dellarobia had described nearly every facet of the encounter in a run-on sentence.

“What I’m trying to tell you is, how could a person be so g-d stupid?” Dellarobia said, not quite finished yet with the initial testimony. “Walking around my whole life thinking I’m named after some Martha Stewart thing, and it’s an Italian artist.”

“So maybe he made it up. It could be a pickup line. Who is this guy?”

Dellarobia was short on details, where that question was concerned. He’d come all the way across the country to see the butterflies. He’d said New Mexico. The state, not Mexico the country. He was American. Someone had forwarded him the Cleary Courier article, over the Internet. He’d called the reporter to verify the specifics of what she had seen, and the location. Then flew into Knoxville and rented a car from there. “He’s driving a VW Beetle, did I mention? I think he was kind of embarrassed about the car. He said he’d reserved a Prius but instead they gave him the Volkswagen. What kind of company rents out Volkswagens?”

“Wait a sec,” Dovey said. “He flew across a whole damn country and drove to your place, to see butterflies?”

“That is correct.”

“Did he seem, I don’t know, insane?”

“How would I know? I spend my life with people that want to eat thumbtacks off the floor.”