my job to shovel the shit pile.” He didn’t say it to be mean, or to complain. He said it because we’d trained him to be proud of all that he could do.
“Excuse me?” asked the girl.
Helen rallied. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s called humanure. We let it sit for two years before we put it on the garden.” Maybe she even hoped to make the intake worker laugh. But the girl never wrinkled her makeup with a smile.
“Do you have a toilet?” she asked. Perley hesitated like he’d heard that one before, but the girl gave him that private smile again. “You can tell me,” she said. “I won’t be mad.”
“We shit in a bucket,” Perley said. When he saw my face he said, “I mean poop. But if you only have to go pee, just do it in the woods. Don’t do it in the bucket because it starts to smell really bad. But it’s okay if you have an accident. Mama L and Mama K say that a lot of times with girls especially if they’ve had a baby, they poop and pee at the same time. They can’t really help it.”
Helen looked at me, but me and speaking were no longer on speaking terms. I had seen what good open mouths had done us, and I meant to keep my mouth shut. My tongue was dead. My lungs were flat. I had no voice. All I had were arms and hands to hold my boy against me until they pried him loose.
The intake girl’s fingers sped across her tablet, but with her other hand she kept turning the pages of the binder.
Helen, gone lame with desperation, said, “Let’s put that away. It’s probably boring. It’s not finished. It’s actually not even fact-checked, not completely.”
The intake worker thumbed. Stopped. Read.
“What’s Survival Dice?” she asked, and Perley was eager to explain.
When Perley was a baby, I’d promised to respect the mystery of him. So here he was, mysterious. I’d never noticed before how much Perley wanted to show himself to other people. He practiced, he prepared, he learned and recited each day, and somehow he believed—had we taught him this? where had it come from?—that the day would come when the world would reward him. He’d yearned for that day, and now he figured it was here.
Helen, on overdrive, pushed aside boxes, dove beneath the sink, unearthed a mouse nest and a family of cockroaches, rummaged and cursed, until, flushed and breathless, hat falling over her eyes, ratty hair coming loose over one shoulder, she rose. “Found it,” she gasped. She clenched that old housewarming gift, the one from my boss at the hardware store. The economy-size, unopened, seven-year-old bottle of hand sanitizer.
“We care a lot about hygiene around here,” she said. “I know you people are really big on this stuff. Am I right?”
The intake worker remained silent, frowning slightly.
“Right?” asked Helen again. She pushed forward, toppling window frames. She raised the hand sanitizer above her head. “Right? Just admit it. Please could you admit that you people love hand sanitizer? Just give me that.”
“Please,” the girl said. “Please calm down. I am going to leave now, and we can have this conversation later when I feel safer.”
“Safer? What in the hell does that mean?” asked Helen, brandishing the bottle.
“You are behaving erratically,” said the intake worker. “So I’m going to come back at a better time.”
She turned to me. I stood swaying, my fingers numb from grasping my boy. “I will make my report, and you can expect that we will be in touch again soon.” Then she knelt down again before Perley, her prize.
“Perley, honey, don’t worry,” she said. “Remember that you can tell your teacher anything that happens, okay? We are here to help you. Sometimes mommies and daddies—even when they love you very much—they need help. Or they need a break. And it’s not about you, and it’s not your fault.”
“We don’t have a daddy,” Perley said.
When she left, the house fell down around us and we burst into flames.
* * *
Helen and I sat on the sofa, hands limp on our laps, deer skull bubbling, dinner forgotten. Perley sat between us, peering between our faces, the Best Practices Binder on his lap.
“I’m just glad you weren’t here alone, Lily,” Helen said.
“You should have let me handle it,” I said.
“You needed my help,” said Helen. “You couldn’t even talk. You had guilt written all over your face.”