Grace slips the shoe free — it is like dragging a root from soft ground.
“We had a farm,” she says. “Did he tell you? Horses and billy goats. And when I was born Daddy planted trees up and down both sides of the drive.”
“He’s a busy man,” Helen says.
“And the trees grew faster than I did, one right across from the other and such, all up and down the drive.”
Room by room, Carl rolls through the house, switching the intercoms on. He leaves traces: a spatter of piss on the toilet seat, a spoon in the disposal. The cheesecake he finds at the back of the fridge, he probes and strokes with his thumb. He folds a bed back; he turns a TV upside down.
He searches their drawers, their closets, swipes a flaking snapshot he finds of Grace’s mother, blurred — a girl in a boat on the ocean. He swipes a cheap loop of pearls and a stocking — sleek things for his pockets. For his window, he takes a delicate carving of an animal he cannot name.
When the telephone rings he picks it up, gasps into the mouthpiece. When he breathes into the intercom, the sound travels through every room.
“Halloo, halloo. Carl here.”
Grace nickers: she had forgotten: there are intercoms inside and out. Her father had insisted on it — all those speakers when her mother was sick, everything pinched and glinty.
She walks off the porch and, squatting, tamps out her name with the flat of her hand in the unbroken glaze of snow. She writes Grace then scuttles in a squat to a new patch and tamps out F-R-A-N.
Her father is coming to her, dragging his foot in the snow.
He had made rounds through the house when his wife was sick, turning the speakers up. Spoke to Sarah, when he spoke at all, from the porch, the garage, the living room. And if his wife was speaking that day, from whatever place she had dreamed herself to, from the farm, from the shabby flat in New Orleans, she asked: Walter, where are you?
On the verandah, he would tell her, conceding.
Verandah. Carport. Parlor.
On the verandah: the blue sizzle of the buglight — he insisted — always on. There was not a closet, a corner, an hour left where you could go and not have to hear her every howl, every sip and fidget. You could forget almost to breathe the whole of the house seemed to do it.
The dog, loping out in front of her father, reaches Gracie first, drops the squirrel on its back beside her. Grace goes to her knees to see it. The squirrel’s mouth is still pulsing; its small legs are canted out, its paws drawn up like spiders. The white strip of its belly is mounded and soft, the broadly gaping seam of an animal stuffed with cotton. Grace nudges the tail and it flickers. She prods the ribs; the body curls and spits.
“What are you doing?” her father says.
“I’m thinking.”
“Can’t you think standing up with the rest of us?”
Grace turns up the cuffs of her father’s pants.
“I’m thinking.”
She pulls the wrinkle from the neck of his sock.
He steps away from her.
“Francesca,” Walter says.
He could weep almost, done in by her name. All her long life he had said it.
She taps the squirrel’s head and it hisses.
“Don’t do that.”
“It’s not dead yet,” she says.
“I can see.”
When she reaches to touch the squirrel again, Walter hauls her to her feet by her elbow. She stumbles into him.
“You don’t listen,” Walter says.
He bends to knock the folds from his cuffs. “You just do your own thing.”
“I’m listening, Doc,” Carl says from inside the house, a broadcast over the intercom. “I can see. You okay, Gracie girl?”
Grace sniffles. She hooks a thumb in each ear not to hear him.
“I took her out to Pop’s place one time, it’s in the country.”
Grace hums a song, makes it up, walks away off to the bank of trees.
“He’s got animals and all like that. Keeps a garden. I thought she’d like that. We do a little this and that for Pop, give him a boost, he’s old. I’m talking nothing — a weed here and there, maybe sweep something out. Maybe it takes half the morning. Gracie disappears. Docs her own thing, I heard that. And me and Pop, we’re neither of us, we can’t go and find her. I got a kid brother — I think he could go, but he is gone off, too. The two of them — disappeared. You get the picture. He’s a pretty boy, handpainted. Never been busted up.”
Helen slumps onto the picnic bench. She is tired; she has been tired for years.
And the day began so sleepily, sweetly, reading a book on the fold-out while the snow kept on in the gauzy light tilting, spinning down. She heard tinkering, nothing more — and now this, and there would be more of this, she knows. Chin up, carry on, count your lucky blessings. My.
She bends her leg up, examines the run in her nylons. The skin underneath is frayed. Fine, Helen thinks. It gives her something to show to Walter, how he walks off: Look what our dinner guest did.
“Here’s what I thought,” Carl says over the intercom.
He has rolled his chair into the bathroom.
“I was thinking you could spare us some dough, man. We got hospital bills, you know that.”
“We have bills of our own,” Walter says.
“Our own?” Carl says. “What does that mean? What the fuck does that mean?”
“Walter,” Helen says and pets his arm, “be quiet.”
A light comes on in the bathroom and Carl’s face appears in the window, mashed against the glass; his nose, bent — two holes; his lips Hexing, stiffening, then flowering out obscenely.
Walter pitches the golf balls at Carl, which rocket away off the glass.
“Don’t be stupid,” Helen says, and she jostles the door to their bedroom.
“You want in, Mommy?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“There’s plenty. I’m checking out the doctor’s medicine chest: two of them, three of that, once a day as needed. Good God, Doc. You’re a walking toxic event.”
He runs water.
“I’m own take a few. Just a tickle,” Carl says, “see what happens. I’m give out. I been rolling all over the house, man. You got ROOMS. Some I can’t even get to.”
He shakes some pills out. “A little help here and there. Why not? We got ER bills, we got ambulance. Gracie, tell them about the ambulance.”
He turns the faucet off. “Hey, Grace?”
Grace is down by the dog house kicking around through the leaves.
“She gets bit by a ant, she stubs her toe, and she calls the goddamn—”
“She didn’t used to,” Walter says.
“The hell she didn’t. She calls the goddamn ambulance. Grace! Where’d she go, Doc? Ain’t you watching her?”
They hear him coming. He bashes out onto the porch.
“I oughta knock your goddamn teeth down your throat. Grace! Grade girl.”
Carl rolls up close to the railing, lifts himself out by the arms of his chair to see across the yard.
“So help me, man.”
He cannot see her, cannot get to her — it is steps going off the porch. There is a hot wire strung to keep the dogs away below the wooden railing.
Walter pokes his nose up, sniffs at the air. He starts toward the patch of pine trees and, seeing nothing of smoke or flame, turns, breaks into a clumsy trot. It is inside the house, it must be.
But it’s not: it is the scorch of Carl’s pantleg he smells against the wire fence, and the stink of flesh searing.
Carl slams back into the picnic bench, swatting at his pants.