"You were hurrying?"
"Oh, yes, m'am. He was fit to be tied. Spam ain't nothing for a working man to eat."
"And wieners are?"
"I thought about chops. I thought about chops."
"Didn't you know your husband was coming home for supper, Mrs. Albright? Doesn't he come home for supper every day?" She's a really nice person, Mavis thought. Polite. She didn't look around the room or at the boys' feet, or jump at the crashing noise from the rear of the house, followed by a toilet flush. The sound of the photographer snapping his cases was loud when the toilet stopped. "Got it," he said. "Real nice meeting you, m'am." He leaned in to shake Mavis' hand. His hair was the same color as the reporter's.
"Get enough of the Cadillac?" asked June.
"Plenty." He made an O with thumb and forefinger. "You all be nice, hear?" He touched his hat and was gone.
Sal left off squeezing her mother's waist. She leaned forward and concentrated on swinging her foot, only occasionally hitting Mavis' shin.
From where they sat no one in the room could see the Cadillac parked in front of the house. But it had been seen for months by everybody in the neighborhood and could now be seen by anybody in Maryland since the photographer had taken more shots of it than he had of them. Mint green. Lettuce green. Cool. But the color wouldn't show in the newspaper. What would show would be the size, the flashiness of the place where babies had died. Babies forever unseen now because the mother did not even have a snapshot of their trusting faces.
Sal jumped up and screamed, "Ow! Look! A beetle!" and stomped on her mother's foot.
Mavis had said, "Yes, m'am. He come home for supper every day," and wondered what that would be like: to have a husband who came home every day. For anything. After the reporter left, she wanted to go look at the damage Sal had done to her side, but Frank was still in the bathroom, asleep probably, and it wasn't a good idea to bother him.
She thought to clean the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic covers, but where she wanted to be was in the Cadillac. It wasn't hers; it was his, yet Mavis loved it maybe more than he did and lied to him about losing the second set of keys. It was what she talked about last as June left, saying, "It ain't new, though. It's three years old. A '65." If she could, she would have slept out there, in the back seat, snuggled in the place where the twins had been, the only ones who enjoyed her company and weren't a trial. She couldn't, of course. Frank told her she better not touch, let alone drive, the Cadillac as long as she lived. So she was as surprised as anybody when she stole it. "You all right?" Frank was already under the sheet, and Mavis woke with a start of terror, which dissolved quickly into familiar fright. "I'm okay." She searched the darkness for a sign, trying to feel, smell his mood in advance. But he was a blank, just the way he had been at supper the evening of the newspaper interview. The perfect meat loaf (not too loose, not too tight-two eggs made the difference) must have pleased him. Either that or he had reached balance: enough in, enough at hand. In any case, he'd been easy, even playful, at the table, while the other children were downright bold. Sal had Frank's old shaving razor unfolded by her plate and asked her father a series of questions, all starting with "Is it sharp enough to cut…?" And Frank would answer, "Cut anything from chin hair to gristle," or "Cut the eyelashes off a bedbug," eliciting peals of laughter from Sal. When Billy James spit Kool-Aid into Mavis' plate, his father said, "Hand me that catsup, Frankie, and Billy you stop playing in your mother's food, you hear?"
She didn't think it would take them long, and seeing how they were at supper, enjoying each other's jokes and all, she knew Frank would let the children do it. The newspaper people would think of something catchy, and June, "the only lady journalist the Courier had," would do the human interest.
Mavis tried not to stiffen as Frank made settling-down noises on the mattress. Did he have his shorts on? If she knew that she would know whether he was looking to have sex, but she couldn't find out without touching him. As if to satisfy her curiosity, Frank snapped the waistband of his boxers. Mavis relaxed, permitted herself a sigh that she hoped sounded like a snore. The sheet was off before she could complete it. When he pulled her nightgown up, he threw it over her face, and she let that mercy be. She had misjudged. Again. He was going to do this first and then the rest. The other children would be behind the door, snickering, Sal's eyes as cold and unforgiving as they were when she was told of the accident. Before Frank came to bed, Mavis had been dreaming of something important she was supposed to do, but couldn't remember what it was. Just as it came to her, Frank had asked her was she all right. Now she supposed she really was all right because the important thing she'd forgotten would never need doing anymore.
Would it be quick like most always? or long, wandering, collapsing in wordless fatigue?
It was neither. He didn't penetrate-just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the nightgown that covered her face. She could have been a life-size Raggedy Ann. Afterwards he spoke to her in the dark. "I don't know, Mave. I just don't know."
Should she say, What? What you mean? What don't you know? Or keep quiet? Mavis chose silence because suddenly she understood that he was talking not to her but to the other children, snickering behind the door.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe we can fix it. Maybe not. I just don't know." He let out a deep yawn, then, "Don't see how, though." It was, she knew, the signal-to Sal, to Frankie, to Billy James.
The rest of the night she waited, not closing her eyes for a second. Frank's sleep was sound and she would have slipped out of bed (as soon as he had not smothered or strangled her) and opened the door except for the breathing beyond it. She was sure Sal squatted there-ready to pounce or grab her legs. Her upper lip would be raised showing eleven-year-old teeth too big for her snarling mouth. Dawn, Mavis thought, would be critical. The trap would be agreed upon but maybe not laid yet. Her sharpest concentration would be needed to locate it before it sprung.
At the first hint of gray light Mavis eased out of the bed. If Frank woke it was all over. Clutching a pair of red pedal pushers and a Daffy Duck sweatshirt, she made it to the bathroom. She took a soiled brassiere from the hamper and got dressed fast. No panties, and she couldn't go back in the bedroom for her shoes. The big thing was to get past the other children's room. The door stood open and, although there was no sound coming out, Mavis chilled at the thought of approaching it. Down the hall to the left was the little kitchen-dining room, the living room to the right. She would have to decide which way she was headed before she ran past that door. They would probably expect her to go straight to the kitchen as usual, so maybe she should shoot for the front door. Or maybe they counted on her changing a habit, and the trap was not in the kitchen at all. Suddenly she remembered her purse was in the living room, perched on the television cabinet, which, when the set broke, had become a catchall. And the spare keys were pinned under a tear in the purse's lining. Holding her breath, eyes wide to the darkness, Mavis padded quickly past the other children's open door. With her back exposed to that much danger, she felt feverish-sweaty and cold together.