did she find herself becoming entranced, staring deeply, dazedly, at the objects. Corey and Roz, and Shaina, finally had to take slightly more serious note of Molly’s finds when it came to the potsherd and the Bible.
“It’s okay,” Corey said.
“If only we were still just a disappointing roadside attraction,” she said.
There had always been a conversational generosity between her and Corey, an unspoken willingness to strive for wittiness, to laugh even if the wittiness fell flat. He was a brother to her after all these years working side by side, confronting baffling fossils month after month, joking about their bewilderment.
“Well at least Roz is over the moon about the ticket sales. Have you checked our social media feeds lately?”
Though of course he knew she hadn’t; that was his department, and she had never taken the least interest.
“Where’s Roz anyway?” she said.
“Made an early run to Quincy Herbarium.”
“Fifi Flower?” Molly said. The term always made her smile—Roz had permitted Viv to nickname her latest big find.
“What else.”
They were all obsessed with the fossil Roz uncovered a couple of months back—or had been, until the more recent distractions. The specimen was a paleobotanist’s dream: a well-preserved plant with all possible characters (flower, stamens, pollen, leaves, roots). The blossom had bilateral symmetry, like an orchid or iris. But this flower looked nothing like an orchid or iris. The plant didn’t look like any known species on the planet. As was the case with an abnormally high percentage of the specimens they found at the Phillips 66, Fifi’s location in the fossil record was proving impossible to determine, no matter how many herbaria visited or experts consulted.
So Molly and Corey and Roz kept going, kept pressing ever farther into the earth, hoping that someday it would all fall into place. Nonsense converting, wondrously, to sense. But though the Pit yielded plenty of fossils to their shovels and picks, eight years in they often had no greater comprehension than they’d had eight months in.
What would it be like, she sometimes wondered, to have a job that didn’t, day in and day out, defy one’s understanding?
“I think we need a new name,” Corey said. “The Pit Stop?”
Molly couldn’t tell whether he was being serious.
“My in-box is exploding,” Roz said, and Molly, already jittery, jumped as her boss appeared out of nowhere. “Can we hire Viv as an intern? Have you seen the parking lot? We should raise ticket prices. There’s no way Fifi is in the orchid family.”
Not awaiting their responses, Roz vanished as abruptly as she had appeared.
“Okay, so,” Corey said in the silence that followed Roz’s departure. They were both long accustomed to Roz’s manner: curt, yet somehow charismatic. Then, looking right at Molly, Corey said: “Kids getting the best of you?”
“What?” she said, suddenly self-conscious. Was it her eyes? Her skin? She tried hard to not look like a worn-out mother. To not look much like a mother at all, here at work. To dress androgynously and keep her exhaustion to herself.
“Relax!” Corey said. “Nothing. Just, I spied you last night from my car, running through the ShopMart parking lot. You were crying, weren’t you? I would’ve stopped but I was already in the left-turn lane.”
“I didn’t go there last night.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Molly. I’ve been there. I wept openly at IKEA last weekend. The lighting section. Dazzling. David leave for Buenos Aires yet?”
“This morning. For a week plus. But seriously, it wasn’t me.”
“Okay. My bad.”
He seemed unconvinced. She was annoyed, but she considered herself the kind of person who got over annoyance quickly.
“Straight to recycling?” she said, pointing at the mail.
“Oh, didn’t Roz tell you? She thinks we should start filing all of it, now that we’re getting more every day. Just in case. I’ve been labeling file folders. Death Threats. Hell Threats. Threats to Our Families. Threats to Our Souls. Threats to Corey’s One-Night Stands.”
It was the kind of black humor that had served the three of them well in the weeks since word about the Bible had gotten out, but she found herself unable to smile.
“You’re doing the tour, right?” he said, glancing at his phone. “Friday’s yours.”
“Don’t tell me it’s eleven already.”
“Four minutes till. Thirty-three folks at my last tally. I counted from the bathroom window. I’ll be in my office if they turn out crazy, okay?”
9
She stood perfectly still, trapping Ben’s body (squirmy, squirmy) against her chest. She stared at the lid of the coffee table, trying to pretend she had imagined it.
She tuned in to Viv’s