usurped by the need to cut a flawless, symmetrical ear out of a freshly baked cake. She had been no one and nothing else.
She looked at Zoe, who was crouched at her feet, whimpering and slapping the speckled linoleum with the palms of her hands. Mary knew what was coming. Soon Zoe would topple over into a fit of dissatisfaction from which no comfort would rouse her. Zoe was the strangest of the children, a locked box Mary couldn’t penetrate with kindness or impatience or little gifts of food. Susan and Billy were more comprehensible; they cried when they were hungry or tired. They’d look beseechingly at Mary, even in their worst tantrums, as if to say, Give me anything, any little reason to feel whole again. A toy could console them, or a cookie. But Zoe seemed to welcome misery. She could fuss for an hour or longer for no discernible reason—she was preparing to do so now. Mary could feel it coming, the way her own mother had claimed to feel the approach of rain on a fair day. She felt it in her joints. Spread before her on the countertop were cake layers, coconut icing, gumdrops, and licorice whips. She looked at her work and she looked down at the furious child who was about to fall into despair with a kind of voluptuous and hopeless pleasure, the way a grown woman might fall into bed after still another frustrating day.
“Con?” Mary called.
“Yeah?” he answered from the back yard.
“Con, the baby’s all over the place in here. Would you take her out there with you for a few minutes till I finish this?”
She waited through the three-beat silence, during which he would be drawing a deep, moist breath, considering refusal. She waited until he said, “Okay. I’ll be right there.”
She straightened her knife on the Formica. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said to Zoe. “Daddy’s going to take you outside for a while, to play with Susie and Billy. You’ve been cooped up in this old house way too long, haven’t you?”
Constantine banged in through the screen door. “She’s really bothering you?”
Mary took a breath, and turned to him. She put a lilt into her voice.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “I’m working on my masterpiece here, and I need just a little tiny bit of peace and quiet to get it done. So would you be an angel?”
She touched her hair and offered a soft, embarrassed laugh. She was as lost in the demonstration of her own qualities as she had been in the slicing of the cake.
Constantine kissed her cheek, laid a hand on her shoulder. “This is a big deal you’re putting together, huh?” he said.
“The biggest,” she answered brightly. Zoe pounded the linoleum with the flats of her hands.
Constantine said to her, “Hey, you wanna go play with your brother and sister a little? Huh? You wanna go raise a little hell in the back yard, give your momma a break?”
He bent over to lift the baby. Mary caught a hint of his smell as he raised the child in his arms: his dank odor mixed with deodorant and the new cologne he’d taken up, a combination of sweetness and brine.
“You’re a saint,” she said.
Constantine bounced the baby in his arms. “How’s it coming?”
“Fine,” she said. “Just fine.” She leaned over the cake to block his view. She was surprised to find that she didn’t want him to see the damaged ear, though she knew he would neither notice nor care.
“It’s a surprise?”
“Mm-hm. You kids just go out and play now, okay?”
“Yes. Come on, Zo. Let’s see what your sister and brother are getting into out there. Let’s go knock some sense into them.”
He left with the baby, whose imminent fit of misery had been at least temporarily checked by motion. Mary waited for the sound of the screen door sighing shut. Then, with a relief that was palpable, like tiny valves opening inside her chest and belly, she returned to the cake. Although she was not artistic, she believed she understood an artist’s temperament. She understood the absorption and the urgent, almost bodily hunger for time, simple uninterrupted time in which to work. She stayed up past midnight sewing and baking, carving pumpkins, twisting leftover pine branches into wreaths. Still, there were never enough hours and there was never enough money. Almost every day when the children cried, fought, or clung to her she lost her breath, as if the sheer disorganized passage of time