LITMIR.BIZ

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him because the alternative was too difficult to contemplate.

      “We’d like to pitch in, Arthur and I,” Martha said.

      Charlotte shook her head again, the familiar ritual. “You’ve done too much already, Martha.”

      “We know how hard it can be for a young couple.”

      Charlotte’s eyes welled without warning, a hot, stinging shame. She turned to wipe down the stove so that Martha wouldn’t see. So that Martha could slip the folded bills into the pocket of her apron.

      “Really,” Charlotte said. “It’s not necessary.”

      “We insist,” Martha said. “We just wish it was more.”

      Thirty minutes later they were gone, Dooley’s parents and his brother and sister-in-law, their three boys, all of them headed home. Five minutes after that, Charlotte was filling the roasting pan with hot water and dish soap when Dooley strolled into the kitchen, his coat and hat and gloves already on.

      “We’ll need some milk for tomorrow morning, won’t we?” He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I better run up there before the store closes.”

      “Your mother gave us another three hundred dollars,” Charlotte said.

      He rubbed the back of his neck. Dooley preferred to enjoy the fruits of charity without having to acknowledge the tree or the picking.

      “Well, dang it, Charlie,” he said. “I don’t want their money. We don’t need it.”

      She wanted to laugh. Instead she turned off the hot water and stepped away from the cloud of steam. “She insisted.”

      “Well, next time you tell her no, Charlie. You understand?” He started edging toward the door. “Anyway, I better run up and get that milk.”

      “And you’ll be back in a jiffy,” she said, “right after you have just one drink.”

      That stopped him in his tracks. His expression reminded her of the picture that had been on TV all afternoon: Lee Harvey Oswald bent double, his mouth a startled O as Jack Ruby fired a bullet into his stomach.

      Charlotte had surprised herself, too. But in for a penny, in for a pound. “We can’t keep on like this,” she said.

      “Keep on like what?” he said.

      “Let’s sit down and talk about it, honey. Really talk, for once.”

      “Talk about what?”

      “You know what.”

      His face darkened, a gathering storm of righteous indignation. When he was drunk, he swore that he would never in his life touch another drop of liquor. When he was sober, he swore that he had never in his life touched a drop.

      “What I know,” he said, “I know the girls are going to need some milk for their cereal in the morning.”

      “Dooley …”

      “What’s the matter with you, Charlie? Why do you want to ruin Sunday for everybody?”

      She felt her energy drain away. He would keep at this, keep at her, for as long as it took. When you stood between Dooley and a bottle, he was the surf pounding the cliffs to sand. Surrender was the only sensible course of action.

      “Go ahead,” she said.

      “Don’t you want the girls to have milk for their cereal in the morning?”

      “Go ahead. I’m sorry.”

      He left, and she folded the tablecloth. She swept up the crumbs under the dining-room table and checked on the girls in their room. Rosemary had no fewer than three different Disney True-Life Adventures books open before her. Prowlers of the Everglades, The Vanishing Prairie, and Nature’s Half Acre. Joan was carefully clipping squares from sheets of colored construction paper. The dog lay curled between them on the bottom bunk, his usual spot.

      “What are you doing, sweetie?” Charlotte asked Joan.

      “She invented a game,” Rosemary said. “She’s going to teach me how to play when she’s finished inventing it. Where’s Daddy?”

      “He ran up to the store,” Charlotte said.

      Joan lifted her head. A look flashed between her and Rosemary. Or did Charlotte just imagine it? They were still too young, surely, to understand.

      “What are the rules of the game, Joan?” Charlotte said.

      “They’re very complicated,” Rosemary said. “Aren’t they, Joan?”

      “Yes,” Joan said.

      “Mommy?” Rosemary said. “Is Mrs. Kennedy very, very sad because the president died?”

      “I would think so, yes,” Charlotte said.

      “What will she do now?”

      “What will she do? I’m not sure. Do you mean—”

      “Who will she live with?” Rosemary said. “Who will take care of her?”

      The question surprised Charlotte. “Why, I imagine that she’ll take care of herself.”

      Rosemary looked doubtful. Another look flashed between her and Joan. “Mommy?” Rosemary said.

      “One more question,” Charlotte said. “And then I have to get the clothes off the line before it’s dark.”

      “You’d be very, very sad if Daddy died,” Rosemary said, “wouldn’t you?”

      “Daddy’s not going to die. I promise.”

      “But you’d be very, very sad.”

      “Of course I would,” Charlotte said, and she meant it. Dooley wasn’t a bad person—far from it. He loved Charlotte and loved the girls, and he’d never once lifted a hand to any of them in anger. And the drinking … Deep down, she knew, he genuinely wanted to quit. One day, perhaps, he’d manage to do it.

      But suppose he did quit drinking. What then? Charlotte’s life would be easier, certainly, but would it be happier? The seconds and minutes and hours would continue to tick past. The weeks, the months, the years. The futures she might have had, the women she might have become, those ghosts would grow fainter and fainter in the distance until they disappeared altogether. If Charlotte was lucky, she’d forget that they’d ever haunted her.

      And the girls. It pained Charlotte that one day Rosemary and Joan might ask the same questions of themselves: What will we do? Who will take care of us?

      Rosemary had turned back to her books, Joan to her squares of construction paper. Charlotte lingered in the doorway. She thought about her initial reaction to the assassination, how permanently fixed in her life the news had made her feel. But maybe that idea needed amendment. No, her world would never change—not unless she did something to change it.

      The tornado might have blown Dorothy from Kansas to Oz, but Dorothy was the one who’d had to open the front door of the farmhouse and step outside.

      Charlotte’s fingers touched the money in the pocket of her apron. Three hundred dollars. She had perhaps twice as much in the girls’ college savings account, money that Dooley didn’t know about and couldn’t squander.

      Nine hundred dollars. It wasn’t nearly enough. But Charlotte didn’t let herself stop and think.

      “Girls,” she said. “Go pack your suitcases.”

      “Are we going somewhere?” Rosemary said, excited. “When are we leaving?”

      Every now and then, Charlotte dreamed that she could fly. She’d be skipping to school, a child again, and then suddenly she’d find herself gliding weightlessly over cars, over trees, over entire houses. The secret was to not think about what was happening to you, what you were doing.

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