Molly assumed it was the elderly paleo enthusiast who had called the local paper; anyway, there was a reporter on the tour the next day.
Still the milk would not come. Every time she pumped she felt sorry for cows. When she poured cow’s milk for Viv she experienced a flash of mother-to-mother gratitude: Thank you, Ma Cow, for letting me steal your milk for my own offspring.
She looked up at the drop ceiling with its uneven tiles, marveled yet again that the Phillips 66 retained its gas-station smell even now, that eternal mix of Jolly Rancher and beef jerky, the scent of quarry dust just a thin overlay. She waited impatiently for the milk to flow. But the more impatient you were, the more the milk resisted the pump.
She thought again of the twin pennies. Stalwart, insignificant.
The milk gushed into the bottles.
7
She ran into the bedroom, where Ben—crying—had flipped himself over and crawled toward the bottom of the bed. She caught him right as he tumbled off. She could have felt victorious for the improbable save, but instead she just felt guilty for having left him alone on the bed when she knew better than anyone how mobile he had become, how swift.
Yet there was little opportunity to indulge her guilt, to reflect upon it and make resolutions for the future, because in the bathroom Viv was calling for her, and Ben was clawing affectionately at her neck (she needed to trim his nails, she’d been meaning to do it for days, but he guarded them so ferociously whenever she brought out the clippers), and her heart rate was elevated as it always was when she was the sole caretaker of her children, imaginary footsteps or no. She wondered if other mothers experienced it, this permanent state of mild panic, and worried that perhaps they didn’t, that perhaps there was something wrong with her. What a phenomenon it was to be with her children, to spend every moment so acutely aware of the abyss, the potential injury flickering within each second.
Ben now kissing her neck, but he was still learning what a kiss was, so his consisted of a wide-open mouth and drool and teeth.
Viv now delivering a litany from her toilet perch: “Can you please read me Statue of Liberty? Wait, no, actually, can you please read me Birthday Blue? No, actually, really, can you please read me The Why Book?”
Moment by moment, maddened by them and melted by them, maddened/melted, maddened/melted, maddened/melted.
She relished the unpleasant kiss. She said to Viv, “Okay, okay, okay—wait, I still don’t know where The Why Book is, did you and Erika find it?” She stepped out of the bedroom and walked to the bathroom, just a few steps. If she hadn’t been passing through the hall at that exact instant, she would have missed it: the lid of the coffee-table-toy-chest lifting up a centimeter and then immediately, gently, sinking back down.
8
It was with some pride that she screwed the tops onto the bottles of milk. Nearly four ounces in each. She pressed the pair of bottles, warm with her milk, against her cheeks. Partway the accomplishment of an animal, partway the accomplishment of a deity. Then she zipped the bottles into the small cloth cooler where she hid them; perhaps Corey and Roz would prefer not to see her bodily juices sitting beside their lunches in the communal fridge.
She rehooked, rebuttoned.
A couple of weeks back she had put a photograph of the kids as the wallpaper on her computer; they were wearing backpacks too large for their frames and hugging each other too tightly. Neither was smiling. They seemed scared, big-eyed. It was just the chance of the shot, the millisecond of solemnity caught by her phone’s camera amid shrieks of laughter, yet it struck her, almost pained her, to see them so vulnerable. She hadn’t realized how frightened they looked until she saw the picture on the larger screen. She reminded herself for perhaps the twentieth time to change the image. But not now. Later, when she had time. Ha.
On her way from her office to the improvised kitchen, repurposed from the beer and slushy section of the gas station, she almost collided with Corey, who was carrying a pile of mail. He was wearing his I Put the Pal in Paleobotany T-shirt, a custom-ordered gift from Roz. She had gotten three, one for each of them. The exact kind of thoughtful act that people with young children don’t have time to execute. Molly’s resided at the bottom of her pajama drawer, but Corey, somehow, managed to pull it off.
“Your fault,” he said, theatrically waving the mail in her face. “Roz and I just want to sit around wondering about prehistoric plants.”
She recognized the handwritten, crooked-stamp quality of hate mail, and the dread of the past few weeks, the shock of something so quiet and private going viral, getting out of control, settled dense in her stomach after her morning of ignoring it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. It was her fault that the Phillips 66 was being turned upside down from all this attention. It was she who, in her sleep-deprived fugue state as a mother of two, had picked up and examined objects that Roz and Corey (and Molly herself too, before) would have thrown away without a second glance, assuming they were simply bits of trash the wind had tossed into the Pit. Only in her post-Ben apocalyptic exhaustion did she find herself becoming entranced, staring deeply, dazedly, at the objects. Corey and Roz, and Shaina, finally had to take slightly more serious note of Molly’s finds when it came to the potsherd and the Bible.
“It’s okay,” Corey said.
“If only we were still just a disappointing roadside attraction,” she said.
There had always been a conversational generosity between her and Corey, an unspoken willingness to strive for wittiness, to laugh even if the wittiness fell flat. He was a brother to her after all these years working side by side, confronting baffling fossils month after month, joking about their bewilderment.
“Well at least Roz is over the moon about the ticket sales. Have you checked our social media feeds lately?”
Though of course he knew she hadn’t; that was his department, and she had never taken the least interest.
“Where’s Roz anyway?” she said.
“Made an early run to Quincy Herbarium.”
“Fifi Flower?” Molly said. The term always made her smile—Roz had permitted Viv to nickname her latest big find.
“What else.”
They were all obsessed with the fossil Roz uncovered a couple of months back—or had been, until the more recent distractions. The specimen was a paleobotanist’s dream: a well-preserved plant with all possible characters (flower, stamens, pollen, leaves, roots). The blossom had bilateral symmetry, like an orchid or iris. But this flower looked nothing like an orchid or iris. The plant didn’t look like any known species on the planet. As was the case with an abnormally high percentage of the specimens they found at the Phillips 66, Fifi’s location in the fossil record was proving impossible to determine, no matter how many herbaria visited or experts consulted.
So Molly and Corey and Roz kept going, kept pressing ever farther into the earth, hoping that someday it would all fall into place. Nonsense converting, wondrously, to sense. But though the Pit yielded plenty of fossils to their shovels and picks, eight years in they often had no greater comprehension than they’d had eight months in.
What would it be like, she sometimes wondered, to have a job that didn’t, day in and day out, defy one’s understanding?
“I think we need a new name,” Corey said. “The Pit Stop?”
Molly couldn’t tell whether he was being serious.
“My in-box is exploding,” Roz said, and Molly, already jittery, jumped as her boss appeared out of nowhere. “Can we hire Viv as an intern? Have you seen the parking lot? We should raise ticket prices. There’s no way Fifi is in the orchid family.”