Maisie is lying on her stomach in front of the sofa, one side of her face pressed to the floor. “Hazel,” she pleads. “Sweetheart.” She reaches out her arm to no avail. She reports that the dog is now the size of a cantaloupe, obstinate and trembling in the farthest corner where no one can reach her without moving furniture. “Will one of you bring me a piece of cheese?” Maisie asks, not looking up.
I put down my sewing and go to the refrigerator. Joe and Emily are no doubt in the barn, sorting, stacking, repairing. They will sit in the barn office, which is full of spiders and hay, placing orders and writing checks. They know how to make good use of an hour of lightning, and so do we, but our use is different. I willget the mending done. Nell will make a spinach pie for dinner. Maisie will continue to try to coax the dog from under the sofa.
“So when did Duke start sleeping with Pallace?” Nell asks, pulling out the mixing bowls.
I laugh. Maisie sits straight up, banging her head on the edge of the coffee table.
“Ow!” I say on her behalf. “Are you okay?”
She rubs her head with her fingers then checks them for blood. “Have the two of you been talking without us?”
“No.” Nell comes over to look at her sister’s head in another flash of lightning. “But you know where this is going.”
“I swear to you, I have no idea where this is going.”
“That’s where this is going,” I say.
“I didn’t think PallacelikedDuke.”
“Sometimes that makes it all the more compelling.”
Nell nods in sad agreement and I start to think that when this is over, and it is very nearly over, each of my daughters should be asked to serve up their own brief pasts.
“Well, we can’t talk about it when Emily’s not here,” Maisie says. “We promised.”
“We sure can’t talk about it when she is here,” Nell says. “She’s not going to want to hear anything bad about Duke.”
“How did you know if Mom didn’t tell you?” Maisie asks. “Did Dad tell you?”
Nell groans.
“That’s a horrifying thought,” I say.
“I know that Duke’s sleeping with Pallace because that’s the way it works.” Nell has put on red lipstick this morning though I cannot for the life of me imagine why. “The guy likes the star of the show. Then later on he doesn’t like her because she’s the star of the show. Then there’s a new show with a new star and he realizes the new one’s better.”
“For the record, I didn’t know any of this at the time.” I raise the shirt I’m mending to my lips, bite the thread.
“And you want to be an actress?” Maisie asks Nell.
“Because it’s so different in vet school?” Nell replies.
Now Maisie’s quiet. Her long-distance boyfriend has recently told her he needed space, as if there had been some shortage of space. Nell has told me this in strictest confidence. From Maisie I’ve heard nothing. She lies back out on her stomach. “Hazel?” she says.
“Emily doesn’t understand anything about the way the world works,” Nell says. “Benny’s been in love with her since she was three.”
“Faithfully in love,” Maisie adds.
“She says, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to date lots of people. You get to go out and have experiences and all I’ll ever have is Benny.’?”
Maisie stretches her arm further, the cheese in her upturned palm. “Which is like calling a marine in Afghanistan to tell him that you wish you got to go to war, too.”
Nell shakes her head. “She’s only been in love with Benny and Duke.”
“So maybe it would help her to know that Duke was unfaithful,” Maisie says.
“Maybe we don’t need to talk about it at all,” I say. “That works for me. Duke ended up with Pallace for a while. What else is there to say?”
“I feel so bad for Sebastian,” Maisie says.
