Frankie licked icing from her fingertips. “I know my mother will never be the same. I know my father wants to run away. I know I’ll lie to Father Greg.” Frankie began to wrap a long scarf around her baby doll. She started with its feet and wound the scarf around its body until it was a tight, lavender cocoon. She handed it to Uncle Eric. “And I know I want Jasper to make it but he won’t and that James will be the one who lives instead. And I already don’t like James because he’s the reason Jasper won’t live.”
Uncle Eric was as quiet as Frankie could imagine a person being. She looked at his long eyelashes, at the way his lips seemed stained with wine, his eyelids stained with ink. She watched his slender hands, how his fingernails were all different lengths, some as short as a construction worker’s, some as long as Miss America’s. She watched as he wrapped the baby doll in a second scarf. Then he handed it to Frankie and she wrapped it in a third. Then she handed it back to him for a fourth. They went on like this, silent, back and forth with the doll, until it was dark outside and the cicadas were as loud as a thousand wire brushes on drum skins and the baby doll was the size of a Virginia ham and they set it in the nest like an egg and went to bed in the guest room where there were still some blankets.
“So, you don’t know Loretta?” Uncle Eric asked in the dark. Frankie shook her head on the pillow. “She was born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, and she had three sisters and four brothers and she got married when she was fifteen.”
Frankie was thinking of her patent leather shoes. She was thinking of the box they came in. She kept seeing Jasper in the box. She kept trying, in her mind, to cover him up with tissue paper but the tissue paper kept sliding off.
“She’s had sixteen number-one songs.” Uncle Eric lit a cigarette as they lay in bed. It crackled red in the dark, then he exhaled. “‘Somebody, somewhere don’t know what he’s missin’ tonight,’” he began to sing, in a way that almost sounded like talking. “‘Lord, here sits a woman, just lonesome enough to be right. For love ’em or leave ’em, how I need someone to hold tight.’”
In her mind, Frankie was able to pull the tissue paper completely over Jasper. But through it, she could still see his face. Like Uncle Eric’s in the cellophane envelope.
Uncle Eric gave a little laugh from his side of the bed. “Oh, Sugar,” he said. “I can’t sing worth shit. But I sure have had a nice time with you.”
Frankie pretended to be asleep. Downstairs, she could hear the click of Uncle Eric’s stoplight as it cycled through its colors. She knew you couldn’t hear that click in the real world. No one out there knew stoplights made any sound at all.
In the morning, Frankie woke to the sound of crying. It was Uncle Eric, back in his bedroom, sitting at the window with the last piece of cake, looking out at a gray windless day.
Frankie came and stood at his side. She could see the windsocks drooping from the trees like real socks. “Which one was it?” she asked.
Water ran from Uncle Eric’s eyes. Not from one corner or another, but from the entire eye. “The little one,” he whispered. “He never stood a chance.”
Frankie thought of her ruined parents. She thought of James, at the age of nine, fat, in a baseball dugout. She thought of Uncle Eric’s hip, how the bones were like two puzzle pieces that didn’t fit, but how doctors had pushed on them anyway to make it look like they had finished something. And Frankie thought of her gray wool coat with the brass buttons. It had been hanging in the back of her bedroom closet since Thanksgiving, and in its inner silk pocket, still wrapped in one of Uncle Eric’s napkins, was the quail—her quail—tucked into its nest.
SUNDAY
PAUL LEMMON DIDN’T like to talk about the way his son had died. Why any father would want to talk about how his kid had died was beyond Paul, but there were some who did. There were some fathers who had to talk about it over and over again, like they were hanging the memory on a clothesline and their yammering on and on was the sun, just bleaching the sadness out of it, fading the death into something they could handle wearing. One time, Paul had gone to a support group for grieving fathers, held in the basement of some cold, broke Baptist church, and the men launched into their various tragedies as if it made them feel better to do so. Paul had sat on his folding chair in that fluorescent circle and listened to the lurid details of two drownings, a stabbing, a choking, an accidental gunshot to the head, a car accident, three overdoses, and an electrocution involving a baby, a bathtub, a curling iron, and a house cat.
When they got around to Paul, for his time to share, he whispered void of color: “Fuck all y’all.” Then he showed them his nubs, where his arms used to be, one of which was long enough to wear a pirate hook, which he could tell the men admired, and he said: “Let me tell you something no one knows. Not even my new wife. About these here arms, or lack thereof. Losing them wasn’t no accident. I got rid a-them on purpose. Because after my son died, all my arms did was remind me I didn’t have no son to hold no more.”
The men looked at Paul like he’d told them he was Jesus and he was back and they were all in a shitload of trouble. Then he screeched up from the metal chair and left the meeting, but because he left early, Pauline wasn’t there yet to pick him up, so when the rest of the men finally left the meeting and came out to the parking lot, Paul was still standing there, waiting for Pauline to drive up in the Corvette, and he had to interact with them. He had to listen to them say how sorry they were and he had to pretend like he was capable of accepting their horrible apologies. And he had to act like he was a decent person who wouldn’t replay their children’s deaths to make him get his mind off his own child’s death.
Pauline could best tell the story of how Paul lost his arms. She could tell it as if she’d been there, to anyone and everyone, to those who looked at Paul’s nubs out in public and those who had enough decency not to. She told it as a cautionary tale, as entertainment, as if it were no big deal, as if it were the only deal. She told it as if it were the first chapter of Genesis, the last chapter of Revelations. She told it in a way that Paul came to adore, because the way Pauline told the story made it all seem true. It made Paul seem like a victim. It made Paul hate himself just a little less. He could always see the story working its way up in Pauline, in a waiting room, in line at the grocery. She’d twist and turn and wring her hands until the story came out of her like a sneeze on the face of whoever would listen, whoever would pretend to.
“Oh, it was something else,” she’d burst. “Two years back, when Paul worked at Weiss Meat Processors right before we met, someone somewhere high up at the place decided to put in a new machine that cut baloney into shapes. It was for the kids, right, Paul? That’s right. A promotional gimmick that cut the baloney into dinosaur shapes. Was that ever a mistake if I’ve ever heard of one. I mean, all children like their baloney. No one needs to go and make the baloney any different for a child to eat the baloney. You ever heard of a kid who won’t eat a piece of baloney? A kid don’t need a piece of baloney to be shaped like a bronnysaurus to make them like it. Was some of them bronnysaurus-shaped, Paul? I think they was. I don’t know my dinosaurs from my dogs, but that don’t matter. What matters is the fella who trained Paul on the machine, come to find out after all this happened, he had an addiction with marijuana. So, that was part of the problem. The other part was that Paul didn’t normally work that shift, but they asked him to stay and do a double, so you see how all this adds up to the sort of settlement that’ll get you a Corvette. But don’t you just know it, Paul agrees to do a double because that’s the sort of man he is, a good man, and there’s this new gizmo and Lord if it don’t take less than ten minutes to mistake his arms for two logs of lunch meat before you can say scat. Pow!” Pauline would illustrate, stomping one meaty leg wherever they happened to be. “A pterosaurus on the right arm, down to the bone. Then, bam!” she’d stomp with the other meaty leg to even things out. “A stegodactyl on the left arm, clean through. I tell you, clean through like an apple corer.”