“Our dad, I guess,” Roland offered.
I blanched, visibly. “Somebody else,” I said.
“We don’t know,” Bessie said, again frustrated to have to admit what she didn’t know. I watched her stop, take deep breaths. I was proud of her. She looked at her notebook, thinking. “Ooh,” she suddenly exclaimed. “I know!”
“Who?” Roland asked, genuinely curious.
“Dolly Parton!” she said.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Oops, okay, sorry, but, yeah, that’s perfect. Dolly Parton is perfect.”
“Mom played some of her records for us,” Roland admitted. “Jolene.”
“Nine to Five,” Bessie said.
I thought it over. Dollywood. “Islands in the Stream.” That body. She was the best thing that had ever come out of Tennessee. Jesus Christ, it wasn’t even close. Bessie had got it on the first try.
“She’s the greatest,” I said. “So let’s write that down. We’ll see if we can find a biography of her at the library.”
“Who else?” Roland said, now excited, like it was a game.
“Well,” I said, “Daniel Boone, maybe? No, wait, Davy Crockett.”
“With the coonskin cap?” Bessie asked. “Our mom had a record about him, too.”
“That’s him. I think he’s from Tennessee. We’ll look it up.” There was a row of encyclopedias, so I grabbed the third volume （Ceara through Deluc） and looked it up. “Okay, yes, he was born in Greene County, Tennessee,” I told them. “Add that to the list.”
“Who else?” Roland asked, a black hole, wanting everything. But I was confident now. I was rolling.
“Oh, I think, um, Alvin York?” I offered. I knew he had a hospital or something named after him near Nashville. There was a movie one of my mom’s boyfriends made us watch that starred Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper, someone handsome like a dad should be. “He was in one of the world wars, maybe World War Two. He killed, like, a lot of Germans. I think that’s right. He killed a ridiculous amount all by himself.”
“Ooh, I’ll do my report on him,” Roland said.
“Okay, that’s perfect,” I told them. “Bessie, you’ll write a report on Dolly Parton, I’ll do some research on Davy Crockett, and, Roland, you’ll do Sergeant York. Is that cool?”
“Super cool,” Bessie said. It was weird to realize that, for all the ways that they’d been neglected, they were intelligent, so quick to figure things out. You only had to tell them once, and then they knew what to do.
“So can we go to the library?” Roland asked.
“And get ice cream?” Bessie asked.
“Well, let me check with Carl,” I said, and both kids groaned, fell dramatically across the sofa.
I went over to the phone and dialed his number. He answered before the first ring had ended.
“Yes?” he said.
“It’s Lillian,” I said.
“Yes, I know. What’s going on?”
“Oh, not much. Just wanted to hear the sound of your voice,” I said, just to fuck with him.
“Lillian, what do you need?”
“Are you busy?” I asked.
“Obviously this isn’t an emergency, so I’m going to hang—”
“We need to go into town,” I finally told him. “To the library.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” he replied.
“So we’ll never leave the estate?” I asked. “We can’t live like this, okay?”
“Jesus,” he said, his voice rising and then, with crazy self-control, lowering before he finished the sentence, “they haven’t even been there a week. You act like it’s the Iran hostage crisis or something.”
“Well, to them it is,” I replied, keeping my voice low so the kids wouldn’t hear. “The more we keep them cooped up in here, the more they feel like freaks, like we’re hiding them.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said.
“I’ll be with them the whole time,” I told him.
“If they go,” he said, “if they go, then we’ll both be with them.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“Let me talk to Senator Roberts,” he finally said.
“Isn’t he busy?” I asked.
“He is,” he said. “He’s incredibly busy, and he’s not going to be happy to be disturbed.”