“You would know, of course.”
“I’m just saying, Rose.”
Rose went on digging. “You know what’s funny?” Rose said to her sister. “They don’t even have to talk to you. They just stand around near the door.”
She swiped at her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt. “They took turns,” she said. “When Jack got tired, Daddy came limping up the hall. Don’t you think that’s funny?”
“And what did they say?” Libby said.
“Nothing. They just stood there. I was in bed, reading, filing my nails, whatever, and I would hear them. Jack came over every day. I kept thinking he would give up and say something, or that Daddy would — a word, my name, whatever. One of them or the other. I thought once that maybe one of them would come in and sit on the bed. God.”
She jabbed around in the hole she had dug with the dented nose of her spade.
“They must have said something,” Libby said.
“Sure, like, ‘Honey, it’s nothing.’ Something like that?” Rose said.
“Forget it.”
‘“All they have to do is go up in there and squirt a bit—”‘
“I said forget it,” Libby said.
“I mean weeks of it. God,” she said. “Them standing around in the hall out there eating gingersnaps.” Rose looked up at her sister. She saw her sister not seeing her, not looking. “Don’t you see?” she said.
“Not really.”
“Really?” Rose insisted.
“I don’t. I don’t understand you. I don’t see why you had to wait so long so you had to even go to the hospital and actually have to have the thing.” She was walking across the flagstone. “It’s unreasonable. It’s just a lot of meaning.”
Libby walked around behind the house. She dropped the armload of iris and weeds on the heap of limbs and clippings and scratched around on a head of a dog who followed wherever she went now and was standing at her knee. She listened for the baby. She climbed onto a stack of concrete blocks and looked through the high window. The baby was still asleep. The dog was standing behind Libby, whining, ready to spring up onto the blocks. Rose was calling the dog from the garden. The telephone was ringing. Libby listened for Rose to go into the house and wake up the baby to answer the phone. But the phone kept ringing. Rose kept calling the dog from the garden. Libby watched the baby until the ringing stopped. The baby was still asleep when it stopped.
When Libby came back to the garden, Rose said, “That was Jack, I guess.”
“What makes you say so?”
“Because I know him,” Rose said. “He was calling to make sure I got here. He always does that.”
“Well, that’s good,” Libby said.
“Do you think so?”
“Rose.”
“He called the hospital, too. Isn’t that good? He sent a big bunch of flowers.”
Libby went back to digging, piling up the iris. A cluster of low, unimpressive clouds was being blown across the plains. A truck turned off the asphalt road and began to throw, from the slope of sage, a powdery veil of dust.
“Ah,” Rose said, “the man of the house.”
She walked out onto the driveway and waved at him as he came.
Libby threw together an easy meal while her husband played with the baby. He passed brightly colored rings above the baby’s face, nudgled it under its chin. The baby’s eyes were barely open. Its skull was still a funny shape, squeezed into a pointy hump at the top of the baby’s head.
Libby’s husband put the baby in a wicker basket and he set the basket on the floor at his feet when it was time to come to the table. The dog lay down near the basket, watching the baby, lifting up its head from between its paws whenever the baby moved at all or made the slightest sound.
“What a good dog,” Rose said.
It lifted its head to let her pat it.
Libby’s husband ate without speaking. When Rose twisted around to re-tie the robe she had come to dinner in, Libby’s husband kept his eyes on his plate. When he had finished eating all the food on his plate, he picked the plate up and licked it, and when he put the plate down again, there were pieces of food in his beard. He had a sprawling, sunburnt beard and a lumpy, porous nose. His mouth was completely grown over. When he spoke to the baby, all they saw of his mouth was a neat row of tiny teeth and the tip of his tongue between them.
“Bloawgh,” he said, “goochy goo. Talk to Big Bear, Baby.”
He rocked the basket roughly and the baby sloshed side to side.
“Go easy,” Libby told him.
The baby had to wear a harness — webbing and Velero, shoulder to toe — to brace its leg. The leg had caught on something, some bone or cord or who knew what; it had been twisted around and broken in Libby long before the baby was born. The tendons and ligaments of the knee were torn so that the leg, the foot — it was better now, Libby knew it was getting better but it was still something to see, the way it flopped around when the harness was off. With the harness off, the leg looked detachable, like the limb of a plastic doll.
Libby cleared the table. She came around behind her husband and knocked bits of food from his beard.
Rose brushed the dander from his shirt sleeve. The dog got up, whining, and walked underneath the table. Rose listened to it sniffing. It rubbed against her leg. She unwrapped the piece of chewed-up meat she had spat out into her napkin and held the meat in her hand.
“You better quit that,” Libby’s husband said. “I asked her not to do that.”
“Do what?” Libby said.
Libby’s husband kicked at the dog underneath the table.
“I’m just sitting here,” Rose said.
“You’re not,” said the husband. “Goddamnit. I asked you not to do that.”
“Do what?” Libby said.
Rose pushed away from the table. She held the meat out between the slats of her chair where the dog could see it behind her. The dog took a step, slowly, as though stepping hurt its paws. It was looking up at the husband.
“Do you want that?” the husband said to the dog.
Rose dropped the meat into the pocket of her robe.
The husband stood up.
“You want that?”
The dog sat down behind Rose’s chair, pretending to be yawning.
“I thought so,” the husband said.
“That’s a good dog,” he said, and walked over to the dog to pat it. He walked to the basket, the baby in the basket, and he carried it away from the table.
“Here you go,” he said to his wife.
Libby saw, from his eyes, that he was grinning, and from his ears, which had moved a little way up the sides of his head.
He went out of the house with a hammer and saw, and with nails poking out of his pockets. He cut a few boards for the soffit, and stepped up the ladder with one of the boards and with nails sticking out of his mouth. He held the board against the joists with his shoulder.
Swallows built nests in the eaves. Clots of mud from the nests they built were spattered against the side of the house; mud was dried on the screens of the windows.
When he banged on the house, the dog barked.
Rose broke a glass on the faucet. She picked the pieces up, dropped them into the bottom of the glass, dropped the glass in the garbage. She rinsed the sink out, and filled it up again.
The wind was quitting. The boat was bottom-up in the yard.
Libby turned the water on in the bathroom. The dog went into the bathroom and lapped water from the toilet bowl.
Rose didn’t wash the husband’s she did not wash Big Bear’s plate. Instead, she wiped off the flowery rim where Big Bear had not quite licked it clean and she set the plate down in the dish rack. The rest of the plates, she scraped and stacked and left in the soapy water. Rose walked down the hall to the bathroom. The dog was curled up on the bathmat.