They May Not Mean To, But They Do(29)

“Whaddya get me?” she said to him. She realized she was a little drunk. Ben had made a cocktail with apple cider and bourbon.

“Where’s Freddie?” Lisa said politely.

“Home with her own dysfunctional family. Well, just her father, really. She couldn’t leave him. He’s been ill. Men-tal-lly ill.” Oh dear. She was truly drunk.

“Okay, Mom, sit yourself down right here and drink this big glass of water, that’s a good girl.”

Molly beamed at Ben. She beamed at Doug and Lisa. Good old Lisa. She beamed at her mother and her brother, at Coco and the two little girls. When her gaze got to her father, she stopped beaming. He was tugging at the colostomy bag.

“Daddy, don’t.”

He looked up at her. He shrugged.

“You should eat something,” Ben said, but Molly was no longer drunk, not even tipsy. She was sad, suddenly and thoroughly sad. She shook her head at Ben, afraid if she spoke she would cry.

“Marshmallows,” said Cora. “Eat marshmallows.”

“I don’t have marshmallows,” Joy said. “But I have Mallomars. Would anyone like a Mallomar?”

“Shoot a Mallomar, Ruby,” Cora said excitedly.

Ruby said, “I ain’t botherin’ with suchlike nonsense.”

“Ruby is channeling Tom Sawyer,” Coco said proudly.

“Sounds more like Slim Pickins,” Molly said.

“We used to say ‘“Ain’t” ain’t in the dictionary,’” Daniel said to Molly. “Remember? But it turns out it is.”

Joy started telling Ben her story of when she had polio as a child.

“They were all so hysterical,” she said. “My mother fainted, my grandmother had to tend to her, and for all I know, it wasn’t polio at all. Maybe my leg fell asleep.”

“But you were in the hospital, Grandma. They put you in the hospital. It must have been something.”

“Oh, who knows, they were all so hysterical.”

They ate Mallomars while Cora explained Boyle’s Law as she understood it, which Coco said was brilliant, until Cora began speculating on volume and pressure in the bowel, at which point Coco interrupted and said the bowel was not a closed system, and Molly involuntarily glanced at her father and thought of his system, definitely not a closed one. He had fallen asleep in his chair, his chin on his chest.

“Do you want to try the experiment, Grandma? You put marshmallows in a syringe.”

“Well, I don’t have any syringes on hand, sweetheart. Maybe another time. You’ll teach me.”

Aaron’s head jerked up and he said, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“I bet you can,” Cora said. “Can we try? Can we get an old dog? From the ASPCA?”

“But what if it really won’t learn any new tricks and the saying is true?” said Daniel.

“And we’re stuck with an old dog with a low IQ?” said Coco.

“Well, at least it won’t live very long,” Ruby said. “If it’s so old.”

Cora started to cry.

“Ruby, really,” Coco said. “Was that necessary?”

“I’m very sensitive,” Cora said between sobs.

“Death is natural,” Ruby said. “No dog can live forever, especially an old one.”

Daniel rocked Cora on his lap. “Our dog can’t ever die, Cora sweetheart, because we don’t have a dog.”

But that made her cry harder.

On the walk home from the subway, Ruby kicked the snowdrift and waited for her parents and Cora to catch up. Cora was crying and dawdling because she was cold. If Cora would hurry up, she would be warmer, their mother explained, embarking on what Ruby thought was a clear and reasonable, though rather long, disquisition on the relationship between heat and energy. Ruby had tried hugging Cora from behind and duck-waddling along against her to provide some insulation, but there was no satisfying Cora when she was in this mood.

“Hurry up! I’m freezing!” Ruby called.

The snow that had piled up at the edge of the sidewalk was not really a drift. It had been pushed there by snowplows the night before, and it was already specked with black smuts of city dirt. Ruby scooped up a handful of dirty snow and packed it into a ball and took a few steps up the side of the mound of snow. She put the gray snowball in the leather pocket of the slingshot and let it fly, but it fell apart and disappeared into the dusk.

She shuffled her feet on the icy sidewalk. The wind blew and the sky was dark. Cora sniffled and shambled beside their mother. After two more blocks, she again refused to move, demanding a taxi. While her mother and father argued with her, Ruby pushed off and slid on the ice all the way to the next corner. There, the great berm of snow created by the plows took a right angle. She was boxed in by three-foot walls of snow. A narrow path of footprints ran up the snowbank. Over the course of the day it had cut into the bank like a mountain pass. It was frozen now, the bumpy pattern of boot soles shining in the street light. Ruby struggled to the top and surveyed her territory. “I’m the king of the world,” she hollered into the wind. Nobody heard her.

She bent down and pried loose a small rock that had been plowed up with the snow, then fitted it with frozen fingers into the slingshot.

The hole it made in the plate-glass window of the corner market was small, like a bullet hole in a windshield in a television show. The cracks around the hole were the cracks around the hole in the ice on the skating pond in a movie and the little girl slips in, mittens flailing above the cold black water, and drowns.