Chapter One
The pheasant arrived at four o’clock on a Tuesday, and Dana Whitaker signed for it because that was what she did. She signed for things.
She was home by then because Tuesdays she worked seven to three, a schedule she’d negotiated eight years ago when Iris started kindergarten and had defended since like border territory. The delivery man had the box balanced on one knee and a scanner in his free hand, and he looked at the label and then at her with an expression she recognized, the look of a man who had carried something strange enough that he wanted, just once, to be asked about it.
“You want to know what it is,” Dana said.
“Ma’am, I’ve been wondering since Columbus.”
“It’s a taxidermied pheasant.”
He considered this. “On purpose?”
“For a school auction.” She signed the glass with the little plastic wand, her name coming out the way it always did on those screens, a seismograph reading of a signature. “Donated. We take what we’re given.”
“My condolences,” he said, and left her with it, and she stood on the porch a moment in the raw March air, a box the size of a dorm fridge at her feet, the street doing its four o’clock things, the Hendricks’ dog stating its case to a squirrel, somebody’s recycling bin still out from Monday, tipped and rocking. It had been packed by someone with strong opinions about bubble wrap, and when she got the flaps open the pheasant stared up at her with the fixed, offended expression of a bird that had been dead for forty years and still couldn’t believe it. The donation form, taped to its base, listed the donor as the estate of somebody’s great-uncle and its value as “sentimental.”
She carried it inside and set it on the dining room table, next to the microwave, which lived there now because the kitchen had no counters. The kitchen had not had counters since January. It had plywood where counters would someday be, and a sink that worked if you were gentle with it, and a contractor named Gary who answered texts on a lunar schedule. Nine weeks. In January it had been a project, in February a situation, and somewhere in the last two weeks it had crossed over into a condition, a thing the family had, like a surname. She had learned to make coffee on plywood. She had learned a person could make almost anything on plywood if she stopped waiting for the situation to improve, which was, if she let herself think about it, a lesson with more range than the kitchen, so she didn’t let herself think about it, mostly, and made the coffee.
“There’s a dead bird on the table,” Iris said from the stairs. She was twelve and had recently perfected a way of coming downstairs that sounded like furniture falling.
“It’s for the auction.”
“Who’s going to bid on a dead bird?”
“Someone with a den,” Dana said. “Or a grudge. Don’t touch it, it’s older than Grandma.”
Iris came the rest of the way down and circled the pheasant at a respectful distance, phone out, already photographing it for an audience of seventh graders. She shot it from below, from the side, came in close on the glass eye. Her braid had come apart on one side the way it did by this hour every day, and Dana’s hands wanted, on their own, to fix it. She kept them on the box flaps. Three weeks ago Iris had informed her, with the cold precision of a lawyer, that she could do her own hair, and the treaty that followed had terms Dana was still learning. The terms kept moving. That was the nature of the treaty; the treaty was about the terms moving.
“Marcy’s mom is letting her go to the thing Friday,” Iris said, not looking up from her phone.
“The thing at Delaney’s.”
“It’s not a thing, it’s just people.”
“People at Delaney’s house, whose parents I’ve never met, until eleven.”
“Ten thirty.” Iris said it fast, a negotiator’s reflex, and then caught herself being caught. The tips of her ears went pink. On Sunday she had said the gathering ended at nine thirty, and she had said it looking straight at Dana. That was the part that had sat wrong for two days. Not the lie. The eye contact. Dana had lied to her own mother at twelve, everyone lied to their mother at twelve, it was practically developmental, but she had done it looking at her shoes, at the wallpaper, at anything, because at twelve the face still knew what the mouth was doing. Iris had held her eyes and delivered it clean, and Dana had spent two days deciding whether she was raising a liar or a person with excellent nerve, and whether, at twelve, there was a difference.
She folded the box flat, taking her time with it. “Ten thirty is interesting,” she said. “Because on Sunday it was nine thirty.”
“I said around nine thirty.”
“You said nine thirty like you’d seen it notarized.” She slid the flattened box against the wall, where it joined the others, a cardboard record of everything this house had signed for. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to text Marcy and get Delaney’s mom’s number, and I’m going to make one extremely boring phone call, and if the actual end time of this non-thing survives contact with an adult, you can go.”
“That’s humiliating.”
“It’s thirty seconds.”
“Nobody else’s mom calls.”
“Then I’ll be exotic.” Dana picked up the donation form and clipped it into the auction binder, which lived on the dining room table too, between the microwave and the fruit bowl, the whole surface a refugee camp for the life the kitchen used to hold. “One call, Iris. Or Friday is a documentary about the postal service and me.”
Iris made a sound that was not agreement and was not defiance either, a sound with a whole treaty negotiation folded inside it, and went to the kitchen doorway and stopped, the way everyone stopped there now, at the edge of the plywood, the way you stop at the shore of something. “When is Gary coming back.”
“When his heart heals,” Dana said. “Nobody knows. He’s very fragile.”
That got the laugh, the real one, the one that still sounded seven years old, the one Dana would have paid retail for, and Iris took a string cheese from the fridge and thundered back up to her room, and Dana stood in her counterless kitchen and allowed herself, briefly, to feel that she had handled it. The lie addressed, the door left open, no yelling, terms offered. Somewhere there was a version of this afternoon where she’d gotten it wrong, and she’d hear about that version at some future Thanksgiving, delivered across a table by a grown Iris with a grown Iris’s aim. But not tonight.
She spread the binder open and worked at the plywood standing up, because the auction was in eight weeks and the auction did not care about counters.
She had a binder with eleven tabs. She had a spreadsheet whose rows knew things about the parents of Westerville North that those parents would not have said out loud in confession: who could be counted on for wine pull donations, who bid drunk, who bid divorced, which two families could not be seated near each other since the incident at the fall carnival that no one discussed and everyone knew. She had a gym reserved, a caterer at the half-confirmed stage where they answered emails but wouldn’t sign anything, a DJ who kept trying to upsell her on lighting packages with names like Starlight Experience, and now a pheasant. Today’s list: confirm the table count with the custodian, chase the caterer, draft the donation-request follow-ups, enter Gerald’s great-uncle into the spreadsheet. It was, all of it, hers to hold, because in October she had raised her hand in a cafeteria that smelled like industrial ranch dressing, and this was the price of a raised hand in Westerville. She had known that going in. Some part of her, the part she fed least and relied on most, had raised the hand because of it. A held thing could not wobble. A woman holding a gym, a caterer, a DJ, a seating chart, and a dead bird was a woman whose hands were visibly, certifiably full, and there was a safety in that she had never once said out loud.
Tom got home at six, kissed her temple, looked at the pheasant for a long moment.
“Okay,” he said.
“Auction.”
“I figured it was auction or something’s wrong with the food chain.” He set his keys in the bowl and his lunch cooler on the plywood, and rolled his shoulder the way he did after site days, a slow backward circle, and she registered it the way she registered the weather. Site day, then. Which meant the Henderson bid had gone to a walk-through, which meant he’d be at the laptop later, which meant the evening had a shape now, and she filed the shape away. Sixteen years and she could read his day off his body before he said a word about it, and she did not often stop to ask whether he could do the same to her, and if he could, what he’d been reading.
“Gary?” he said.
“Silent.”
“I could call him.”
“You could,” she said, “but then he’d know we’re desperate, and Gary feeds on desperation. We have to be cool. We’re playing dead. Like our friend here.”
Tom looked at the pheasant again. The pheasant looked back with its glass eye, keeping its own counsel. “This is why the kitchen has no counters,” he said. “Because we’re playing dead.”
“It’s a strategy.”
“It’s something,” he said, mild, and got a beer from the fridge, and asked about Iris’s Friday thing, and she gave him the summary version, treaty terms and all, the lie and the phone call and the pending verdict, and he listened with the beer resting against his chest and nodded in the places a person nods.
“You’re calling the mom,” he said.
“I’m calling the mom.”
“She’s going to be mortified.”
“She’s going to survive it. That’s the whole curriculum this year. Being mortified and surviving it.”
Sixteen years of marriage had worn certain conversations smooth, and this was one of them: she reported, he ratified. It worked. She would have said, if asked, that it worked, and she would have been telling the truth, and the truth would have had a plywood layer under it that she didn’t look at directly, the same way she made coffee every morning without looking at where the counters weren’t.
They ate at the dining room table, the three of them and the pheasant, chicken reheated in the exiled microwave, and Iris, who had decided at some point between string cheese and dinner to be delightful, did an impression of her social studies teacher discovering the smart board was unplugged. It was merciless. It had structure. Act one, Mr. Kalb’s confidence, the marker uncapped with a flourish. Act two, the first click that did nothing, the second click, the man’s whole worldview beginning to buckle. Act three, and here Iris stood up from the table to get the posture right, Mr. Kalb following the cord hand over hand along the wall like a sailor in a storm, all the way to the outlet, and finding it, and holding up the plug to the class in silence, like an exhibit, like evidence of a crime society itself had committed against him. Tom laughed until he had to put his fork down. Dana laughed and watched her daughter take the bow that was owed, flushed with the specific joy of a twelve-year-old who has the room, and thought, with no ceremony at all, that this was a good life. It was a thought she had often, and on purpose.
After dinner the house sorted itself into its evening stations. Iris showered and went horizontal with her phone. Tom took the laptop to the armchair, the Henderson numbers open, the game on low beside him more for company than attention. Dana took the couch and the seating chart, and for forty minutes the only sounds were the dishwasher running its little heart out against the silence where a kitchen used to be, the announcer’s murmur, keys. She moved the Brennans away from the Wallaces for the third time. There was no table in that gym far enough for the Brennans and the Wallaces, there was possibly no gym, and she was considering the nuclear option, splitting them across the buffet line’s natural border, when her phone buzzed at 8:40, face down on the auction binder.
She almost let it go. One buzz, short, a text.
Rachel Beal. Dana hadn’t heard from Rachel in over a year, and her thumb was already swiping before her brain assembled a guess, reunion or fundraiser or somebody’s separation announced with a wine glass emoji.
so so sad about nic. are you going saturday??
The gym, the chart, the announcer’s voice, all of it kept going. Dana read the text twice. There was a kind of stillness that started in the hands, she would notice later, before anywhere else. Her thumbs hovered over the glass and did not move, and the screen dimmed, and she tapped it awake, and the words were still in the same order.
Across the room, Tom said something about a foul. The dishwasher changed cycles with a click and a sigh.
Sad about Nic. Are you going Saturday.
There were only so many things it could mean and her mind ran the list with a speed that shamed her, hunting for the survivable ones. Sad about Nic could be divorce. Could be a diagnosis. Could be a fire, a flood, a gallery closing, Rachel grieved widely and at volume, Rachel had once texted the whole group in mourning over a canceled television show. Are you going Saturday. Going where Saturday. You did not go to a diagnosis. She sat very still on her own couch, in the blue light, holding the phone, and let the list run out, and at the end of the list there was only the one thing left standing, the thing that had been standing there from the first read, patient, certain, waiting for her to finish.
She typed, what happened? and deleted it, because you could not ask that. Asking that told Rachel what Rachel’s text assumed you already knew, and something in Dana, faster than thought, some old muscle that managed rooms and phone calls and other people’s assumptions, was already protecting her position, already not wanting to be the one who had to be told.
She typed, just seeing this, and deleted that too.
She typed nothing, for a long time, while the screen dimmed and dimmed.
“You okay?” Tom said, not looking over. Sixteen years. He could hear a silence change.
“PTA stuff,” Dana said. The words were out before she chose them, smooth as a signature. “Julie’s melting down about the caterer.”
“Tell Julie it’s a gym,” Tom said, and the crowd on the television rose about something, and he leaned toward the screen, and that was that, the moment sealed over, the lie already load-bearing.
She looked back down at her phone, at the little gray words that had rearranged the temperature of the room without moving a single object in it. Upstairs the shower fan ticked off on its timer. The seating chart sat open on her lap, all its solvable wars. Nic at forty-six. Nic in a lab coat two sizes too big, freshman year, holding a scalpel over a fetal pig and saying, I’m going to name him Gerald, you can’t stop me. Nic’s last text, whenever that had been. A farmers market. Something about a braid. She had not answered it, she knew that much without looking.
And began, very carefully, in the manner of a woman signing for a package she did not remember ordering, to type.