Butterfly Soup. Nancy Pinard

by the cord strung across the concrete. He might like to take him aside. Buy him a coffee. Tell him not to waste his youth or take his health for granted.

      Ben would nod his head, say yeah and light up a cigarette.

      Inside the station Everett pays with plastic, buys cigarettes from a machine and heads back to the car. The driver’s door stands open, and Everett is surprised to see a dog lying on the floor on the passenger side. “Hey, Fella,” Everett says and puts his hand out, palm up, to a beagle mutt with brown eyes, droopy ears and a pointy snout. Fella has a biscuit wrapper crumpled between his paws and looks up at Everett with guilty eyes, cowering slightly. Everett laughs. “Teach me to leave the door open.” The dog stops licking the grease-stained wrapper to lap Everett’s fingers. “Good stuff, huh?”

      “Hey, Ben, this your dog?” Everett calls. “A dog jumped into my car.”

      Ben walks over and peers in. “Not mine. I hate dogs. My kid sister got attacked by a Doberman.”

      A lopsided silence hangs between them, then settles on the kid’s end.

      “No shit.” It’s all Everett can think to say. He wants to ask if she’s okay but couldn’t stand to hear that she isn’t. He’d have to feel worse for Ben than he feels for himself.

      This dog is no Doberman. “Must belong to someone,” Everett says finally. He turns up an ID tag on the dog’s collar. “I’ll get him out of here for you. Where’s Morningside Court?”

      “Over there behind the Baptist church,” Ben says and points the way.

      Everett raises the window, lights a cigarette, then circles the block with the church steeple. He parks opposite a brick ranch at 136 Morningside, where a man is out back throwing a football to a gangly boy, six maybe, in a Cincinnati Bengals cap. A Jeep and a riding mower sit side-by-side in the open garage, and a gun rack hangs in the Jeep’s back window.

      Everett watches the ball bump end over end when the kid fumbles it. The kid and his dad lunge after it and roll around in a snarl of bodies that knocks the cap off the kid’s head. Everett takes a drag on his cigarette, watching its tip turn red. He waits while the nicotine floods his blood and blows smoke out his nose. Everett and his dad had played together sometimes, but it was baseball. His father, clad in Sears coveralls, would set his empty Thermos in the sink. “Hey, Rett,” he’d say. His father called him Rett. And if supper wasn’t ready he’d ask, “Want to throw the ball around?”

      Everett always said yes but wished for more players—to have a game. He would ask his mother to play, but she’d say someone had to cook—an odd excuse since she barely touched the meals she made. His mother didn’t sweat. Little lines radiated from her lips in permanent discontent. She never even ate her lipstick off.

      A dog would want to play ball. Everett had asked for one for his birthday. His mother had shuddered and given him fish instead. She hadn’t seemed to get it—that he’d wanted to do more than just look at his pet. Despite his disappointment, he’d spent his allowance on snails and colored gravel and a ceramic castle with turrets for them to swim around. At fourteen, when his shoulders broadened and his hips narrowed and his mother shied away from touching him at all, he took cool baths and released the fish into the tub water with him. They’d flipped their fantails at him and chased one another around his legs.

      Everett feels the dog’s belly but finds no genitals. “Guess you’re not a Fella,” he says, rumpling her loppy ears. She stands on the seat, cocks her head slightly to one side and wags her tail as if she’s known him forever. She doesn’t seem to know he’s driven her home. Maybe if the windows were down.

      Everett removes her tag, shifts into Drive and steps on the gas. The kid is too young to catch the damn football. Any dog will do for him. And the man—he has a son, a house, a Jeep, a gun. He doesn’t need a dog, too.

      The entrance ramp to Route 75 is not far down the road. He speeds onto the highway as if he’s being chased, checking his rearview mirror for police cars. After a few miles he relaxes and lowers the passenger window. The dog sticks her nose into the wind. He lights another cigarette. Her ears blow back as they pull into the left lane to pass an eighteen-wheeler.

      CHAPTER 3

       S till in bed, Valley jolts to the banging of the kitchen screen. Her mother’s footfalls shuffle around the kitchen downstairs. A paper bag crackles and a cupboard door knocks shut, wood on wood. Her mother has been to the grocery. She knows all the sounds and can interpret their meanings. At her flute lesson last week Mr. Moore remarked on how acutely she hears. She relistens to his velvet baritone, shaping itself around those words.

      Valley stretches, and her arching ribs strain against the elastic of her bra. Her phone rings, startling her, and she snatches it up. The bell is turned down as far as it goes without shutting it off.

      “Sooo,” Joanie says without saying hello first. “How was it?”

      “Okay,” Valley whispers back. Joanie doesn’t want the truth.

      “You’re so lucky. He’s such a doll. I can’t believe you’re dating a senior. Where’d you go?”

      “To the movie.” Valley glances down at the clothes she wore on the date. The waistband of her shorts is cutting into her stomach. She pops the snap and wriggles them off as she sits up.

      “And…”

      “Then he brought me home.”

      “No stop at Millie’s? He couldn’t wait, huh?”

      “I wasn’t exactly hungry.”

      “I bet. So what happened? How was it?”

      “Fine.”

      “Come on. Tell me. Or is it sacred and you have to keep it to yourself for a while?”

      Valley fingers the gold chain around her neck, searching for the star-sapphire pendant and centering it in front.

      “If you don’t mind.”

      “I can’t believe you landed a football player. It’s too cool. Does he have any friends he’d like to loan me?”

      “Can I call you later, Joanie? I’ve got a babysitting job. I have to get showered or I’ll be late.”

      “Sure, I’ll be here whenever you’re ready to unload the goods.”

      Valley puts the receiver back on the cradle. Joanie gets so wrapped up in the externals. The football. The guy’s age. What she liked best about Mark Thorburn was the way he said “Hey, la-dy” with a funny Southern accent as she passed by his locker on the way to homeroom. There had been no question of a good-night kiss, let alone the stuff that Joanie hopes happened. Valley hadn’t known the script—didn’t know it was all about him. Mark would never ask her out again.

      Glued, mounted and hanging on the wall beside her bed is a photo puzzle. Valley stares at herself, age three, sitting on her mother’s lap in a ruffled dress, her hair gathered in a duck barrette and sticking straight up like a fountain. The jigsaw had divided her face in two, one eye and her nose on one piece, the other eye on its interlocking mate. Maybe that’s her problem. She’s dumb-looking and schizophrenic.

      “What do you think, Gerald?” she asks her current caterpillar—a spicebush swallowtail who is snacking on a sassafras branch in his stocking-covered jar. “Am I crazy?” The caterpillar continues eating, his mandibles nibbling away on the leaf. He looks bigger today. She sees the split exoskeleton, marking the fourth instar she’s counted. He’ll pupate soon. She’ll get some fresh leaves for him today. Maybe she can find him a buddy, too.

      Valley throws the quilt aside and heads to the bathroom.

      “You’re going where?” her mother asks while Valley rummages around the kitchen for something to eat. From her mother’s tone, Valley might have announced she’s headed somewhere outrageous—like prison. As she pours Cheerios into a ceramic bowl, she listens