The song continued in my head. The Stones. “Mother’s Little Helper.” It thrilled me that he hadn’t spelled it out, that he’d been confident I would get it.
“Put him down or he’ll wake the dead,” Mrs. Pike said.
Hugh set him down on his feet with exaggerated alacrity, then pressed his mouth to Stevie’s ear. “You’ll wake the dead,” he said in a slow growl. “And the dead are our only friends around here.”
Stevie sunk his face in his mother’s leg.
“Hughie, he’s four, for pity’s sake,” Kay said.
“Pity’s sake? Who are you, Mrs. Milkmore?” He turned to me. “You know Mrs. Milkmore?”
“Talk about waking the dead. Jesus,” Kay said.
“You think she’s dead?” Hugh raised himself up and thrust out his chest and spoke with his jaw slanted to one side and a wet frog in his throat. “For pity’s sake, Kay, go change that skirt. Your school is not called the Ashing Nudist Colony!”
“Oh God, you sound just like her. She really said that, didn’t she?”
Behind them, Mrs. Pike slipped away through the door. I saw the white of her shirt and the tan of her plaid skirt flicker in a window on the way to her writing desk. Hugh was looking off toward the pool and the ocean beyond it. “I’m having wedding flashbacks.”
Kay watched her mother through a window. “Well, we chased her away in less than a minute. Might be a record.”
“Easy come, easy go.”
“The thing I remember the most,” Kay said, turning back, “is that minister weeping.”
“That’s the thing everyone remembers. He stole the show. Where did she find him?”
“I think he’s the summer church guy.”
“No, it wasn’t. That wasn’t Reverend Carmichael.”
“Reverend Carmichael? How on earth do you know these things? We never once went to that church. I never know if you’re shitting—” She covered her mouth.
Hugh stretched open his glowing green eyes. The whites were full of bright-red threads. He bent his head in front of Stevie’s. “Mommy said a bad word.”
Stevie giggled uncomfortably.
“So, flashbacks in a good way?” Kay said.
He looked off again, nodded slowly. He had more to say but did not say it. He scratched one of his bony elbows. Then he said, “It was magical. It was like a long dream.” He turned back. He looked at me. “Elsie is making you a lovely runny poop bracelet.”
Elsie’s diaper was leaking onto my wrist. As I raced up the wide dark stairs, I felt light, my chest full of something new and exciting, a helium that lifted me from step to step and made breathing difficult but somehow unnecessary. The poop had soaked through the useless cloth diaper and rubber cover and I had to change her whole outfit. I hurried back down to the front patio, but they were gone.
Hugh changed all our rhythms. The children waited for him to wake up. I waited for him to come downstairs before we left the house. Kay waited for the afternoon, when he would join us at the pool and she could talk freely without her mother around.
“She insists that the children eat with us,” Kay said to him that afternoon, “but a fucking hour after their bedtime. It’s the only time she sees them all day and they are at their absolute worst. She keeps calling them sensitive and fragile. They’re fucking exhausted, Ma.” With Hugh, Kay sounded like my father after a couple of drinks. She sounded nothing like who she’d been before.
Hugh lay on his back on the cement, his feet and shins bent into the water. He was tossing one of Stevie’s stuffed animals, a blue bear with a white star on its chest, high up in the air and catching it. Stevie looked on nervously from the shallow end where I was towing him around in a red ring. I was a long-finned pilot whale, he told me, guiding his boat to shore.
“I’m not sure we’re going to have kids.”
“What? Why?”
Hugh didn’t answer.
“Raven doesn’t want them?”
“Stevie,” Hugh said, “this bear wants to get on the boat.” His throw was short, and the bear landed facedown in the water. Stevie moaned that the blue bear didn’t know how to swim and I got it out quickly, before the fabric could absorb much liquid. Kay was still waiting for an answer from her brother, but it never came.
Hugh had married Raven （I wasn’t sure if that was really her name or a name he had given her, like he gave me Cara, but everyone in the family used it, except when Kay called her Molly Bloom, an allusion I wouldn’t get until twelfth-grade English） in the garden the previous summer. Before he arrived no one had mentioned this, but now it came up all the time. After a while I noticed it was Mrs. Pike more than anyone else who brought it up. I got the sense that it was an expensive wedding and there were still some outstanding bills in town （there were stores to be avoided, particularly the liquor store, and trips had to be made to vendors farther away because of it）。 Money was tight for Mrs. Pike, though I heard Thomas say once that that was all in her mind and she made terrible trouble for herself because of it. But Mrs. Pike didn’t seem to resent Hugh for the wedding. She just needed to confirm, several times a day, that it had been worth it. For her, remembering it and talking about it increased its value, or at least helped her get more and more of her money’s worth, as if they were still using it, like an expensive appliance whose frequent use justifies the cost.