The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,126

each time I pulled into my drive and saw my father’s old blue pickup truck—he’d taken to dropping in on her.

“She looks like a wine barrel on toothpicks,” Dad said of her. He liked to sit on a bucket and feed her handfuls of beet pulp. If beets were, according to old wives’ tales, supposed to induce labor in women, he thought perhaps beet pulp would do the same for a donkey. The only effect it seemed to produce, though, was fuchsia foam around her lips and pink-tinted teeth.

“According to Dr. Coatney, she’s overdue,” I said. “She says donkeys gestate twelve months on average, but some go thirteen or more.”

We didn’t have the exact date she’d been bred, of course. Mr. Pete Early, now in jail, had responded to the Humane inquiry with, “Fuck you. How the hell should I know?”

“Everything is healthy and on track,” Dr. Coatney assured us, but the donkey was not at all serious about getting this show on the road. Sometimes you could see one of the foal’s hooves, or a folded knee, pressing against Luna’s sides. How amazing that a whole donkey, with four legs, a tail, and a head was folded up in there like origami.

Then I’d look at Gabriella, touch my own stomach, and think the same thing: this amazing human being was once all folded up inside of me.

One night, Gabby and I were at the kitchen island, both of us studying (she, news magazines for current debate statistics; me, a foaling book I’d ordered online).

“Who will be your date to the wedding?” she asked. “Vijay? Or Dubey?”

I closed my foaling book. “Maybe neither.”

“You need a date, Mom. Dad will be there with Lydia.”

“So? I don’t care.” She stared at me. “It’s not a competition. I could be remarried, but I chose not to be. I don’t care what any of them think of me.”

Gabriella cocked her head. “How do you get there, Mom?”

“You get there by living, I guess. You live and you learn.”

“You’re a quick study, then,” she said.

“What does that mean?” I was pretty sure she was complimenting me, but I wanted to be sure.

“You seem so . . . happy. You’re way more fun and cool now than when you and Dad were together. Which is weird, because he’s the one who left, but he’s the one who seems so sad and . . . stuck. You had this shitty thing happen to you . . . but it’s like you used it as a springboard, you know?” She grinned. “You don’t need a man.”

“I want one,” I admitted.

“But that’s totally different than needing one,” she said.

Amen. I wanted to dance to hear her say those words.

Chapter Forty-Three

THE WEATHER GREW WARMER, LUNA GREW FATTER, AND Hank grew thinner.

Olive became more frantic about the wedding, but at salsa class, at least, Olive and Nick never argued. Hank and Helen continued to come as Hank began his chemo—and for all but one class Hank even danced. His hair thinned after the second cycle but wasn’t entirely gone (although Helen told me it filled the shower drain and came off in her hands). He and Helen held a focus, an intention so bright it sometimes blinded me to look at them. They talked of the future, of Olive and Nick’s wedding, of next year’s garden, of where they’d dance. Rather than denial, it seemed like determination. When that determination was so sharp it cut me, Dubey would sense it and gently ease the wound. His timing was impeccable.

I began to doubt I truly wanted to have a new partner. Not yet anyway. There were moments I thought, Good God, what did I just do, turn away the best single man in the world?

Other times I’d break out in cold chills at the close call.

And at yet other moments I was smitten with Dubey like a schoolgirl.

Aurora said it best one day. I was in her house, with her two greyhounds lying at my feet and her luscious paella in a bowl before me. “I look around sometimes,” she mused, tapping her bowl with her spoon, “and I think, What would a man add to this picture? Most of the time, I can’t think of any way he wouldn’t detract from it. When I find the guy who enriches the picture, then fine. In the meantime, though, my life is pretty damn good.”

When Gabriella earned the place of valedictorian, her humble response was, “Great. Another speech? It’ll be easy after the