White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,27
how she’d had to tease words out of him, the way he neglected his socks until the holes grew so large, three toes came through. She’d loved his old-fashioned sense of honor, at least she did when she believed he possessed it. Now, she didn’t know who he was.
He began again. “What I mean is I’m not stopping you from seeing someone yourself—if you wanted to.”
“I don’t need your permission,” she said coldly. “It’s already been offered, and I turned it down.”
“Who was it?”
She wouldn’t tell him. What she found unforgivable was the way his eyes dilated with excitement when she threw out that piece of information. How dare he? She picked up her pillow and moved into the spare room. She hunted around for sheets and dragged them out of the closet. When she lay down on the bed, the sheet felt cool for a moment, and then it turned hot. Out the window was a remote sliver of light, a wedge of new moon shining in all its blank indifference.
She heard Lawrence get up, and then the sound of truck wheels crunching over gravel. She was stunned, humiliated. Until now, she’d told herself, okay. This is normal, this is modern. But now, sobs erupted that couldn’t be stopped.
The dogs were waiting for Daphne. Alice got out of bed and found her lying on the kitchen floor, exhausted, her head on her paws. She’d gotten out during the dinner party at Erika and Hasse’s. She looked up but didn’t raise her head; her eyes looked bleary. The pack outside seemed to be thinning. Alice asked, “Are you pregnant?” Daphne lifted her chin and put it down again.
She pictured the perspiration near Erika’s hairline, her bone white skin and dark hair. Lawrence touching her. There was a ferocity in that woman, wolf-mother. Lawrence never had a chance. She was playing with him for her own reasons, she didn’t really want him, but he didn’t know that yet. A wave of protectiveness washed over her, metamorphosing to rage. “Bastard,” she said as she climbed back into the guest-room bed, the word bouncing off the white wall.
11
Five days a week Isaac worked at the sunken garden, hardly stopping to eat. He came early in the morning and worked late. His tools were a pick and shovel and a wheelbarrow, which he used to bring dirt out from the floor of the garden to the mounded lip. Every hour, he moved great piles of earth. Alice worried he’d get sunstroke and told him not to work so hard. She didn’t know what drove him. All she knew was that he couldn’t go back home, and he had no future she could see.
It was a late Friday afternoon. Isaac had dug down six or eight feet. The hole was already ten feet long and six feet wide. She’d agreed to go out the following day and buy some small trees with him to plant on the perimeter of the hole. She was inside with the doors and windows shut against the hot wind. Suddenly, his voice was at the door facing the garden. “Something has happened, mma. I have broken the water pipe with the pickax.” Behind him, water geysered skyward.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It looks bad, but it’ll be okay.”
He jumped down in the hole and turned in circles. Alice ran inside to call the water people. For once, the phone was working, a kind of miracle. She came back out and told Isaac that the people would soon be coming.
She tried to stuff an old nightgown into the pipe and was holding it there with the handle of a rake when the water blew past the nightgown and shot back skyward. She climbed out of the hole. “Well, that sure didn’t work.” Daphne paddled around at the bottom of the hole in the mud while water erupted above her head.
A pickup truck drove into the driveway. At first she thought it was the water people, but then she saw that the driver was Peter Ashton, and beside him, Lawrence. In the back of the truck was Peter’s Alsatian dog, chained to the bar behind the rear window, straining toward Daphne.
“Isaac hit the water main,” Alice said to Lawrence. “What’s that dog doing here?”
“It’s the one the Moretons recommended.”
“You’re going to set him loose on her?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“The two of you were just going to stand here and watch him screw her?”