Helen sits with her mouth pressed closed. Grace tears at the soft middle dough of the bread, rolls a ball in the palms of her hands.
“Grade, okay, I got it,” Carl says. “I seen her a mile away. She’s fucked. I understand that. But, you, cupcake, and the doctor, you confuse me. Because you look okay! No kidding. You look more or less all there.”
He pulls a finger through the mashed potatoes.
“Okay, so a person can fool you. Even Gracie could fool you, pretty as she is, if she don’t say much, if you don’t really see her move. Say if you saw a picture — woo. She’s a looker, our Grade, don’t you think so?”
He licks his finger, holds the lump of potato in his mouth as he talks.
“I carry three shots of her in my wallet, see, just to say, Look here. This here is the one that Doc took. That’s Brenja,” Carl says, and points to the dog. “I guess he’s the one that names the dogs.”
He holds the photograph out for Helen to see: Grace is three, maybe four, lying barebottomed along the dog, watching it nurse its puppies.
“I just love that,” Carl says.
He tucks the photo away, slides another one out.
“This one I took.”
Grace is lying in a fog in a field of cows in the photograph that Carl took, her skin pale as snow, hair a tangle, a clump of grass in her mouth.
“She’s a doozie,” Carl says, “don’t you think so? Here she is a baby, little fat thing, little tub of butter. Hardly moved, I guess — he must of told you. Hardly made a sound. But you can’t see that from a picture, you can’t tell. Keep your distance, that’s the trick. Keep a picture. But you know that, I see. Because Grace isn’t even yours, right? Your kids were born okay, I guess. That’s lucky. Grew up, moved away. The rest of his bunch too — doctors, lawyers, whatnot. Not a peep from them, they been busy. It’s good to keep busy, don’t you think? Don’t you think so, Gracie girl?”
“Oh, yes,” Grace says.
“Take Mommy. Bet you she stays real busy — charity work, blood drives, Meals on Wheels, all that. Am I right?” Carl says.
Grace tips up her plate to show Carl the face, the crooked, zagging mouth she has made on the rim with the dough.
“You got a way with food, baby.”
Carl takes a ball of dough from her plate, a dingy, misshapen eye, tosses it, catches it in his mouth.
“You got to watch her all the time. I go into her room at the Y one time — she’s got stashes, plates underneath the bed. She’s got food in the drawer with her underpants. It’s nasty, man, maggots, mold and shit, so help me. I don’t get it, okay, I admit that. But I don’t just go eew.”
He holds up his glass for Helen to fill; she fills it, the wine sloshing out, Carl rocking himself in his chair. Then he spins away from the table, slams into a door — it flaps open. He pushes through. The dogs are outside, barking, mouths hazing the glass porch door. He flies a kiss at the dogs as he passes. Flies a kiss at Walter. Makes a lap: living room, darkened hall, then the wheels of his chair are stuttering over the polished tile of the kitchen.
“I’m the man with the news, Mommy!”
Helen covers her face with her hands.
“Don’t be like that.”
He yanks his chair to a stop.
“It ain’t Grade’s fault. Didn’t get enough air at birth, okay. Whatever. It happens. She can’t do things, she tries. I think she tries. But you can’t just leave her alone, Mommy! That’s stupid.”
He is knocking into Helen’s chair.
“Take your hands off.”
He pulls her hands from her face.
He says, “Look at me. Look, look. How’d you like to be our Gracie? Look to me for love, man?”
He jams his fingers between Helen’s knees.
“No kidding. Bitter fucking cripple. You got you a job at the VA scrubbing cripples’ potties. How’d you like that? It’s a pleasure. Satisfying, too. But, hey, whoa, hold up, you know all about it. You got orphans, refugees, twisters coming through. I got ears, okay, I hear it. Ladies-Something-Something-for-the-Blah-Blah-Blah. You ladies — riding around on your cunts like that. So pretty so, oh god,” he is scratching runs in her nylons. “You should of come and seen her, Mommy. It of lifted your heart, I swear it.”
It is phosphorous the wisteria needs — but Walter should have done that in October. You thatch the grass in April, after the tulips have dropped their blooms.
He keeps his good eye shut, Walter does, sitting there, beginning to see again with the other eye as with an aperture being opened. As it opens, what he hears seems to brighten. The wing back, given the wings and the way he sits, makes it easy, with the music loud, to hear only the music, little more, and to watch the snow keep falling. But then the dogs start: Carl is sailing through the room in his chair.
Walter goes to the door to hush the dogs and he sees, he thinks, that they have found the bird he lobbed into the trees. He slides the door open. One of the dogs trots off with the bird and stands with it in the snow coming down beyond where the porch light reaches. Walter calls to the dog. It lies down, lays its head in the snow with the bird in its mouth between its outstretched paws.
Walter says, “Stay,” and moves toward it. The dog moves off. Walter shows it the broom he keeps near the door to keep the dogs out of the garden, to keep them from digging the lawn up, to hush them when they bark.
His daughter taps on the glass behind him.
“What happened?” she wants to know.
Walter swings the broom up on his shoulder.
“Come on and help me,” he says.
Grace follows her father out over the yard, crouching, as he does, trailing the dog through the snow. The air is warmer, velvety; a fog has drifted in.
The dog has a squirrel, not a bird, Walter sees that now. He strikes the ground with his broom.
“Goddamnit,” he says. “Stay. I said stay.”
The dog skulks off. Helen makes it out as far as the porch and stops as quick as she sees him — this silent creature she married, stalking a dog with his girl.
Carl locks the glass door behind her. When she turns around, he waves. He flips the outside light off.
“Walter, please,” Helen cries. She starts toward him. “I can’t see you.”
Grace takes her by the hand.
“Over here,” she says. “He’s not far.”
And he’s not. He is waiting for Helen, his arms at his sides. His house is going dark. He lets his wife stand on his feet, on the tops of his boots, perches his hands on the small of her back.
“Get them out of here,” she whispers.
Something is funny, wrong, to Helen, too solid as she presses against him. He’s aroused, she thinks, and blurts out a laugh. She fumbles at the crotch of his trousers, finds a hard, distended mass.
“What in the world?” she asks him.
Walter is grinning. She can’t see this — there are so few lights left on. He pulls a golf ball from his pocket, bends her fingers around it.
“You’ve been golfing?” she says.
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?” Helen says. “What can that mean?”
She twists away from him.
“She’s not my daughter,” Helen says.
And not, Walter thinks, he has thought it before — she is not his daughter, either. Not his doing, at any rate. An accident, damage at birth — nothing he passed down.
His wife is walking away up the slope to the house, Grace falling in behind her. Helen steps out of one of her shoes — the sharp heel sunk, snagged in the grass — and she pitches, slowly, forward, coming down on her hip in the snow.
“In all my life,” she says. “Your father.”
“Your poor feet,” Grace says. “You need shoes.”