‘Fuck you,’ he said, quietly, but enough so it carried. Dorothy felt it tight in her chest.
‘You ladies should expect a visit from the cops.’ Frank was breathing heavily, craning his neck. ‘So check your patch, Rena, check your fucking patch.’
‘Frank!’ Lee burst out of the tangled trees, her face wild and smeary. Daniel followed, carrying Ruth on his hip. He must have run and got them, Dorothy realised, with a swell of gratitude. It was Daniel after all who knew what to do; he was the only one who did.
Their father’s shining face, his grim mouth were terrible to see but impossible to look away from as he advanced on the group of wimmin and his children. Dorothy felt Eve’s face buried in her neck, her fingers painful in their grip. Rena stepped forwards with the gun.
‘For god’s sake Rena,’ Lee said, ‘he’s my husband.’
Just before the chain fence Frank’s body halted with a jolt, unable to go further: the cattle stop had trapped his foot. Deflated, he shrugged, a one-man pantomime. ‘Everything’s gone,’ he said.
Lee shouted at the kids to get their clothes out of the cabins, they were going home.
Rena leaned the gun against the feathered, worn planks of the cookhouse and said, ‘Just making sure.’
‘Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you write?’ Lee said to Frank. He was meant to bring back some gold dust, some kind of mojo to carry him through the rest of their lives.
‘Jesus Christ hell.’
Dorothy was afraid that he would cry. Lee crossed the fence and hugged him. He melted into her.
‘Everything’s gone,’ he said again. ‘Everything.’
‘Oh darling,’ she said. ‘You know, I actually feel relieved.’ She held his face. ‘Don’t leave again,’ she said. ‘I need you here.’
She helped his body find the angle it needed to slide the foot up and out of the grid, though at first he shook off her help. It was like when they fed turnips to the feral horses, Dorothy thought, feeling acutely the limply socked foot emerging from the trench beneath the bars, his sneaker trapped still. He bent and wrenched it out and stood there with one shoe on his foot and the other in his hand, and his cheeks were flushed and sweat blistered his forehead. Ruth ran now, scissor-legged the fence and wrapped herself around his waist. From the cookhouse came the toasty smell of burned rice. One of the wimmin said, ‘Oh no,’ and disappeared inside.
In the cabin Dorothy and Evelyn collected their and Ruth’s things in silence. There wasn’t much to carry.
Their mother said, ‘Sorry, Rena,’ and, ‘Thanks,’ and kissed her on the temple and gathered the unrolled sleeping bags up from the girls and threw them onto the bonnet of the car, where they slid off into the dust.
Rena said, ‘Ah, what are you going to do,’ in a tone that meant she didn’t expect an answer. She pulled Evelyn to her in a pungent hug and reached next for Michael but he ducked out, raising his forearm in defence, and said, ‘Piss off.’
‘Michael,’ Lee said.
He turned and walked to the car and Dorothy saw his face, clouded with fury.
‘What’s up?’ she asked.
‘Nothing. I want to go home.’
Dot was jammed in the back seat of the car next to Evelyn, who was next to Daniel, who checked the time on a grown-up’s large watch, the new digital kind.
‘Where’d you get that?’ Dorothy asked.
He smiled and pressed a button and made the display light pulse. Michael was in the back, Ruth hefty on their mother’s knee, and their father slammed shut the boot and Name came running down the gravel road, waving her arm above her head, Dot’s paperback of folktales in her hand.
A fresh start.
After the New York trip Frank was obsessed with Leadership. This, he maintained, was what had failed his family, the Forrest seniors whose money had vanished, poof, in tanking investments: no unity, no vision. Every book he read was on this subject, as were the status games he introduced over dinner, where there was always one fewer chair than person, and whoever was last to the table had to stand and serve everyone else. ‘Lead,’ he roared at the rest of the kids, the ones sitting down, but all of them resisted. Instead they worked on different ways to revel in the lowliness and make the others laugh, which made him angrier, which made them laugh more. Evelyn passing the tomato sauce around on her