What's Mine and Yours(10)

Ruth Green stared at her as if she had no teeth at all.

“You know, prune back the bushes, rake the leaves. Clear the gutters if you’ve got a ladder.”

She realized then she should have changed out of her robe and slippers, put on her good blue blouse, her boots, dressed herself like a woman who worked.

Ruth Green clucked her tongue.

“Why would I pay you to clean up this yard when it’ll be covered up in ice in a few weeks?”

Lacey wondered whether this nurse, whose lights were always on, whose house was warm, who had a babysitter watch her boy when she left, could ever understand what it was to have a husband, to love him with your bones.

“My propane is down to fifteen percent. Probably ten now.”

“That’ll last you till Monday when the truck comes around. You need their number?”

Lacey explained her youngest had a fever; she was only five. They were making do with Robbie gone—it was just the heat.

Ruth crossed her arms. “You see, the rest of us, we work. We don’t depend on the government or no husband.”

“Maybe you could just lend me a few gallons out of your tank to hold us over.”

“If you expect me to pity you, I don’t. You’re not the only one who married some son of a bitch who can’t take care of his own kids.”

“It’s not his fault. He’s got a chemical unbalanced—”

“They all do,” Ruth said, and she went to close the door.

Lacey pushed her hand against the door.

“My babies are freezing.”

“This is real life, sweetheart. What did you think would happen?”

“Please.”

“You’ll find a way—that’s what women do.”

“You fat cunt.”

The nurse slammed the door.

Lacey stomped through the woods, smashing down fallen branches under her slippers. As she neared the house, she heard the phone ringing. She ran to make it in time.

“Robbie?”

It was the school nurse. Diane had vomited again on the bus, and she needed to go home. Could Lacey come and pick her up? On the long drive to the school, Lacey found herself shaking.

Margarita was the one who had spilled the beans. When her teacher asked her why she kept putting her head down on her desk, she said she hadn’t slept right because it was winter in her house. And since Diane threw up on the bus, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together.

“I’m working on a solution,” Lacey said in the principal’s office.

The principal shook her head and asked what was going on. It hadn’t occurred to Lacey that they didn’t know. Shouldn’t there have been a letter from court to the school? Wasn’t there something the government had done to spare her this moment?

“My husband got high and stole a cop car. Not a black-and-white sheriff’s one, a regular one. It just belonged to a cop. It was parked in front of a bar downtown. He didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ventura,” the principal said. “But after Monday, I’ll have to make a call. You’ve got the weekend.”

Lacey went around to the classrooms and got all her girls. They drove home in silence, past the rows of houses in town, then fields and forgotten barns, the railroad tracks where they had to stop and wait for a train to pass.

“Woo-woo!” sang Margarita, and it made Diane smile weakly, her cheeks pink.

Back at home, she boiled cans of broth for the girls, peeled and dropped in potatoes, a tin of shredded chicken. And then she made grilled cheeses, too, and chocolate milk, and they carried it all into Lacey’s bed, where she piled blankets on top of the girls and then crawled in herself.

“If one of us is going to be sick, we might as well all be sick together,” she said, and she kissed her girls on the nose. It was still light out, hardly past midday.

“Aren’t you going to turn up the heat? You heard what the principal said.”

Noelle still wasn’t looking at her, her ears flushed bright, and Lacey wondered whether she was catching a fever, too, or if she was just ashamed.

“Hush,” Lacey said. “I’m going to tell y’all a story.”

The girls squeezed in closer to their mother, even Noelle, although she probably only wanted to get warm.

“Once upon a time, there was a princess, and she lived in a castle deep in a forest, with just her sisters. All the men were at war, and it was a kingdom with no old people, you see, so there was no one to show them how to live. How to fill the moat, how to feed the horses, how to keep the torches lit, and the dungeons clean—”

“What’s a moat?” Diane asked, sucking on a Tylenol and making a face. Lacey told her to swallow.

“So they saddled up the horses, and they went riding, far and far, over valleys and streams to a kingdom where they had heard the men went to war and never came back. The princesses there showed them how to do all the things they were afraid of—how to clean the stables and grow wheat, how to cast spells, and burn the dead—”

“How to fill the moat?”

“Mm-hmm—and when they knew everything they needed to know, they went riding back to their kingdom, all day, and all night, and they weren’t afraid anymore. They were all ready to rule. But they didn’t have to, after all, cause while they were gone, the princes had come home. They had won the war.”