Verbena

by Nanci Kincaid

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Set in contemporary small town America, this is the story of Verbena Martin Eckert McHale ("Bena," for short), an indomitable woman who is damned—but not doomed—by the bad behavior and bad luck of her two husbands.

When Bena's first husband, Bobby Eckert, dies in a car wreck, she's left with their five children, a little mortgaged house, a little bit of insurance, and a big empty place in her heart. Not to mention that the hole Bobby left is jagged around the edges—he wasn't in the car alone and Bena hadn't had a clue about his girlfriend.

So now she's a cheated-on widow with five grief-stricken children to finish raising. No matter. No matter that she almost burns the house down when she discovers the marijuana farm in their backyard or that she has terrible, loud crying jags in church. When it gets down to it, Bena's backbone bends minimally and her moral center holds.

By the time she's ready to invest again in romance, Bena know what she wants. When she finds the right man and the right circumstances, she doesn't hesitate—she marries Lucky McHale. And what does he do? He disappears off the face of the earth.

Verbena is the vibrant story of an extraordinary ordinary woman—strong, emotional, headstrong, sexy, funny—an especially American woman, one worth knowing and cheering.

Release date: May 17, 2002

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Looking back, it seemed Bena’s life had more or less belonged to her right up until Bobby died and took it away. With Bobby in the grave Bena’s life had quickly become doing what Bobby wasn’t there to do. Get the lawn mowed, keep the car running, pay off the mortgage, and raise his kids right so that they’d all turn out decent, reasonably athletic, and basically honest—which she’d done. Not a criminal among them. They were serious children—maybe that was true. When Bena looked back she worried that probably they hadn’t laughed enough or ever found the pleasure of pure out-and-out silliness and she was sorry about that. But on the other hand, not a one of them was mean.

It was more than five years ago now, but sometimes it still seemed like just last week. The news—which is how they talked about it still. The night we got the news. When he told Mama the news. When the news hit school. Marcus Langley, one of Bobby’s fishing buddies, was standing at the door in his Alabama state trooper uniform looking like a total stranger. He had on his official law enforcement expression, which Bena had never seen before. Beside him was his nervous partner whose eyes were darting wildly like he was afraid to take a hard look at Bena under the circumstances.

“Bena, honey,” Marcus said. “There’s been an accident. It’s Bobby. Killed in a rollover. And Bena, now, he was not alone. There was a woman.” The news had come at once like that, packaged in sentence fragments.

She’d been at home with the kids that night, the five of them. Eddie, the baby, was almost ten and Sissy, the oldest, was a sophomore in high school. The TV was on and every radio and stereo in the house was blaring out some competing noise. Bena was grading papers at the kitchen table. She had the kind of mind that could cut right through the distractions of life and stay focused on her task. She was a sixth-grade teacher then, a good one. That was before she found out they would pay her better money to fill out government forms than they would to teach the children anything about the government. They’d let her do it in an air-conditioned office too and not a sweatbox classroom where all the papers were turned in wet and smeared since it was way too hot for anybody to get a grip on their pencils—or their thoughts.

Then there came the knock on the door that changed everything. The Alabama state trooper car with its flashing light parked in the yard making their dog, Elvis, howl as if he knew exactly what had happened just by pure instinct. And all five of her golden children wild-eyed and frozen at the news that Bobby Eckerd, their daddy, was dead.

Two afternoons earlier Bobby had told Bena he was going to a meeting in Montgomery. His company was trying to get a bid in on paper supplies for Maxwell, the air force base. He said it would take him a day or two and kissed Bena good-bye. And she had let him go off being believed.

THE STATE TROOPERS said Bobby’s car went off the embankment up on that twisty part of Highway 82. They said it looked like he just forgot to take the curve like maybe he thought for a minute his car was an airplane and it would just lift off and sail him through the air, like he was a jet pilot, like he could take wing and fly. There were no skid marks, the state troopers said. No signs of braking. Car rolled over six or eight times. Bobby was killed instantly.

They found the woman in a ravine with her skull mostly crushed. She was still breathing. They took her to Jackson Hospital and called all her next of kin. “We’re sorry, Mrs. Eckerd, to have to bring you this news,” the nervous officer kept saying to Bena. “We’re sorry, ma’am.”

The day after the accident the newspaper ran the pictures of Bobby and the woman together, side by side, like a pair. ACCIDENT TAKES LOCAL MAN’S LIFE, the paper said. WOMAN IN CRITICAL CONDITION.

Bena’s daughter Ellie, who was eleven, brought the newspaper into Bena’s bedroom to show it to her. “Mama,” she said, “you want to see what the woman looked like?” Bena sat up in bed and studied the picture of the woman. Her name was Lorraine Rayfield. She was only twenty-four. Bena had never laid eyes on her before. Her hair was dark and curly and Bena remembered thinking she probably dyed it to get it so black. Bena’s own, once auburn, hair was a noncolor brown. Bena searched the woman’s face and decided that her people might be foreign or something. Italian maybe. Or Puerto Rican. She had the looks of a stranger just passing through on her way someplace else. It was clear she was not someone who belonged in Bena’s—or Bobby’s—life.

“She’s not as pretty as you, Mama,” Ellie said.

“Pretty is as pretty does,” Bena said.

“I bet she’s not as nice as you either.”

“There’s more important things than being pretty—or nice, Ellie. You remember that, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ellie said. “Like what?”

“I don’t know for sure right this minute. You’ll have to ask me later, okay?”

“Like being alive,” Ellie said. “It’s more important to be alive. Right?”

BOBBY’S FUNERAL WAS well attended because nearly everybody loved Bobby Eckerd. His children were scrubbed and good-looking and behaved in a way that would make any father proud. His wife, Bena, was composed and gracious. Anybody that pitied her was wasting time—at least that’s what she told herself at the time. Bena had entered the church with her two sons and three daughters flanking her like clear skinned, blue-eyed soldiers, and she had felt strong in the midst of them. What Bobby Eckerd had needed with Lorraine Rayfield Bena might never know. But she was not going to let her children become ashamed of their father. She was going to insist that they look beyond the obvious. That’s what she had always tried to do herself.

BENA’S OWN DADDY had died when she was fifteen. Afterward once a month she and her mother had gone to his grave with garden shears and spray cleaner. Her mother washed the bird droppings off his marker while Bena clipped the grass from around his grave. They never talked during this time. Bena liked to think it was a labor of love they’d shared.

Bena’s mother died the year after Bena and Bobby married. She was buried beside Bena’s daddy, her name etched on the other half of his marker. Bena and Bobby had moved to Baxter County by then so Bena had had to let the tending of their graves go. It didn’t bother her though, since it didn’t seem as sad, her two parents together again in the bowels of the earth, where their late-life child had no choice but to let them rest in peace.

Bena had been a surprise baby. Her mother was forty-seven and childless when she thought she was going through the change—and she was. The change was the baby she’d stopped wanting years before. She named her Verbena because the verbena was in bloom then. Bena had always thought it was an old-lady name, which made sense because her mother was an old lady when she named her. It was her daddy who’d call her Baby Bena, the second part of which stuck. Thank goodness. A half name suited Bena better.

Once when she was a little girl Bena remembered hearing a lady at church tell her mother, “My verbena is giving way to weeds.”

“This is my Verbena.” Her mother patted Bena’s head.

“You’re named after a pretty little flower, honey,” the lady said. “It grows wild lots of places. Same as a weed.”

Bena had thought then that her name was misleading. She’d never felt like a flower. From the beginning she’d felt more like a weed that had sprung up hearty and uninvited.

Bena’s mother was old enough to be a grandmother—or in Alabama even a great-grandmother—when she delivered Bena. She was hospitalized over a month after the birth, just from the shock of it all. She’d tried to be a thankful and loving mother, but mainly she was tired and very disappointed in God’s imperfect sense of timing. It made her question His divine plan.

Bena’s parents had been each other’s entire lives until Bena burst onto the scene screaming and needing—disturbing the peace and order her parents had fine-tuned in their long, sterile years together. It had never seemed possible to her that the product of a loving union could be the very thing to destroy that loving union. What kind of plan was that? She’d always felt like a rude interruption in her parent’s very polite lives. It was a terrible way to think about herself. An accident, living an accidental life.

Then the proof came: her daddy’s heart attack—or drowning. They’d found him floating facedown in a lake and both things had happened. One, they said, had caused the other. Accidents lead to accidents. Afterward her mother had medicated herself into an early death. The past had started swirling through her head, and everything got out of order like a family album with all the photos spilled on the floor. She could take a pill and there was no present anymore—no future either. She couldn’t recall whether or not she’d taken her medicine. The more she took, the less sure she was. Bena sorted her medicine and wrote out a schedule for her, tried to call and remind her, but then there was the day her mother didn’t answer the phone. Bena was pregnant with Sissy when she watched the ambulance carry her mother away with a pink bedsheet pulled up over her head.

Now, for the first time since they’d been laid to rest Bena wished for her parents. She wanted them to put their arms around her and promise that everything would be okay—something they’d never really done. She wanted them to kiss her children and hold their hands and be strong and wise for them—because she might not be able to be either. It was odd that on the day of Bobby’s funeral instead of wishing for him, she was wishing for her dead parents, who’d been gone such a long, long time. On this day, more than any other, Bena desperately longed to be somebody’s much loved child.

Bobby’s mother wept uncontrollably through the funeral. There was a sort of anger in her grief that was frightening. Bobby’s daddy had taken off years ago—nobody knew where. Afterward, for a while, Bobby’s mother had focused on Bobby, her oldest son, nearly smothering him in love and expectations. Then his stepdaddy, Kyle, came along and distracted her. Kyle owned a construction company. He moved Bobby’s mother into a big, fine house and put the boys to work in the summertime to keep them out of trouble. One by one they’d begun to call Kyle Daddy. Several years back he’d moved the business to Georgia, just outside Atlanta. Now they only rarely saw them or heard from them. Two of Bobby’s brothers still worked for Kyle though. But to this day they insisted Bobby was their mother’s favorite. It had become a family joke. Mama, if we were on a ship and it was sinking, who would you save after you saved Bobby?

Kyle brought Bobby’s mother by the house before the service. Bena was lying down in the bedroom with the lights off. Bobby’s mother eased into the room and sat down on the bed beside her. She shook her head no, no, no, and wept into her handkerchief. Bena had tried to comfort her the best she could.

“You don’t understand.” Bobby’s mother blew her nose. “Bobby wasn’t happy. That’s what breaks my heart. He wouldn’t be off with a young girl—not if he was happy at home. On some level, Bena, you have to know that.”

“It might not be like it seems,” Bena said.

“That’s the trouble with the truth,” Bobby’s mother said. “Nobody wants to tell it—and nobody wants to hear it.”

“You don’t know the whole story,” Bena said. “Nobody does.”

“I know Bobby is dead,” she sobbed. “I know he was searching. He wasn’t at peace.”

“Maybe he was,” Bena said. “He got saved.”

Bobby’s mother closed her eyes and shook her head. “You don’t understand, do you? It was the same when Bobby’s daddy left us. I didn’t want to admit it either.”

“Admit what?”

“That something was missing.”

“What was it?” Bena asked. “What do you think was missing?”

Kyle knocked on the door. “I pulled the car around,” he said. “It’s time to go.”

Bobby’s mother squeezed Bena’s hand and looked at her, “We got to live with this the rest of our lives,” she whispered. “Bobby’s unhappiness.” She shook her head as if she was furious about it. “You okay, honey? I know this isn’t easy for you either.”

IT RAINED WHEN Bobby was laid in the ground. Black umbrellas surrounded the grave like gnats clustered on a wound. It was muddy and messy and the coffin slipped and sank while the men tried to steer it into place. Amen, people said. Bena watched it all as if she were a person in the audience at a really sad movie.

That night her son Joe said, “Daddy ruined everything, didn’t he, Mama?”

“He changed everything,” Bena said. “We’re not going let things be ruined.”

IT WAS TWO WEEKS after Bobby had been buried that Bena got the phone call from Lorraine Rayfield’s mother. “Mrs. Eckerd,” she said, “please forgive me for intruding on your terrible grief.”

Bena was too stunned to speak.

“I’m calling to ask you something,” Mrs. Rayfield said. “It’s hard for me and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

“What is it?” Bena asked.

“It’s Lorraine,” Mrs. Rayfield said. “She’s not doing so good. The doctors say it’s only a matter of. It’s her brain. The damage is. She needs the last rites.”

“I’m sorry,” Bena said.

“So, what I’m wondering is. I was thinking if you might. I’d like Lorraine to die in peace, you know. Do you think you might be able to forgive her?”

“Forgive her?”

“I didn’t raise Lorraine to be off with somebody’s husband. I know in her heart she’s so sorry. It’s just that, if you could forgive her, then maybe she could go, you know. Die. I think she’s lingering until she gets the forgiveness.”

“What do you want me to do?” Bena asked.

“Can you come to the hospital?”

IT SOUNDED TO BENA like the woman must be Catholic or something, all that talk about forgiveness and last rites. Bena was a Baptist. She knew nothing about all the rigmarole the Catholics put their dying loved ones through. She had no idea what they expected from her. Forgiveness, Lorraine’s mother had said.

Bena drove to Montgomery without telling anyone where she was going. She couldn’t have said why she was doing this exactly, except that she’d been asked to. For the most part, when she could, Bena tried to do what people asked her to.

Mrs. Rayfield, Lorraine’s mother, didn’t look much older than Bena. She looked like she could just as easily have been the woman in Bobby’s car. A woman, maybe like her daughter, so compelling that Bobby would be unable to keep his eyes off her and on the road. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered.

“It’s okay,” Bena said.

“I’ll show you where she is.” Mrs. Rayfield took Bena’s arm and led her down the intensive-care hallway and into a cold, well-lit room with a roll-up bed in the middle of it. A bandaged, wired Lorraine Rayfield lay there looking as small as a child. “She can hear you,” Mrs. Rayfield said. “The doctors might think she can’t, but she can.” Mrs. Rayfield leaned over the bed and whispered, “Lorraine, honey, Bobby’s wife is here to see you. It’s okay. She’s not mad.” Then she kissed the bandaged head and stepped away from the bed. “I’ll give you a few minutes alone,” she said. “I’ll wait outside the door.”

For an instant Bena didn’t want to be left alone with this small, dying woman. She stared at the swollen face of a person she didn’t know at all. Lorraine’s eyes were sealed closed and her face was purple and distorted. It occurred to Bena that the dark curly hair in the newspaper picture had been shaved so that the doctors could try to stitch her head together.

Bena pulled a tall stool to the bedside and sat on it. She touched Lorraine’s hand. It was dry and papery. “Your mother called me,” she said.

For a minute Bena just sat and stared at the tiny figure in the bed. She could be one of Bena’s daughters. Sissy maybe. Sissy was a child with a wild streak too, wasn’t she? She tried to imagine Bobby in a car with this woman but she couldn’t think of it, what they would say to each other, where they might be going, what Lorraine had been wearing or planning. It was all dark and impossible.

“Okay.” Bena took a deep breath. “Your mother says you can hear me. I don’t know how you knew Bobby—how long or how well. But, look, Bobby was an easy guy to love. You should have seen his funeral. Everybody came. Practically the whole county. So you shouldn’t feel bad because you loved him too, okay?”

EVEN AS SHE SPOKE Bena wondered if she meant a word she was saying. The words just came to her as if she’d been rehearsing for this scene all her life. She’d have laid hands on and healed Lorraine Rayfield if she’d known how. She’d have commanded her to rise from her bed and go forth and sin no more. It was odd how connected she felt to this woman, the one whose hand she kept instinctively reaching for. Before leaving she leaned over and kissed Lorraine’s swollen face just like her mother had done—as if Lorraine was a daughter both women loved. As if she were every woman’s daughter. Later Bena would accuse herself of simply having been curious to see what Lorraine looked like—this woman who’d been with Bobby when he died. This woman who—dead and alive—had altered Bena’s life forever.

Before Bena left the hospital Mrs. Rayfield said, “Mrs. Eckerd, if you have any questions about Lorraine and Bobby. Their relationship. I’ll tell you what I know. If, you know, that would make things any easier for you. Knowing the truth.”

“No, thank you,” Bena said.

SOME OF THE TEACHERS at school told Bena that lots of times a dead person will appear to have a last word with you or—in Bobby’s case—to explain things and beg for understanding. They said, “You’ll think you’re dreaming, but you won’t be.”

One of the other sixth-grade teachers, Mayfred Piper, who lived a life even messier than Bena’s and whom over the years Bena had come to love for exactly that reason, told Bena that her own dead mother had appeared one night in a white nightgown at the foot of her bed and had reached out and touched Mayfred on the leg. “It was as real as anything.” Mayfred cried telling it and Bena believed her.

But Mayfred was a black woman, and so to Bena that meant she was bent more toward the spiritual in the first place and therefore God might naturally be more inclined to give her some sort of dramatic sign like that. Make her rise up out of the bed singing “I Go to the River” and then fall to the floor in total submission and gratitude. That’s how Mayfred told it, that she lay sprawled on the floor in a humble prayer posture, giving nonstop thanks, until morning came. Bena didn’t personally know any white people who did things like that.

Afterward Mayfred said she knew God had called her to His service and now she was a self-appointed missionary of sorts. “The trouble with Jesus,” Mayfred liked to say, “is that He was just so perfect. A lot of people, they aren’t attracted to somebody perfect. That’s why God’s got to get all the mileage he can out of sinners—like me. I’m like a lightning rod for sinners because I don’t claim to be perfect like a lot of religious people. Nothing like one sinner to attract another sinner. God’s got sense enough to know that. It’s just certain people that don’t.”

Mayfred drove some people crazy being so religious, but Bena didn’t mind it. She wondered how it would be to have God pick you out from the multitudes and assign you a holy task like that. God was always telling Mayfred to do this or that and she was always hell-bent on doing whatever He said, even if it didn’t seem to make a bit of sense.

God didn’t seem as inclined to do white people that way. Bena was secretly glad. She was sure He had His reasons why. But no sooner did she start to think like that than a new teacher at school, one who’d only recently moved to Baxter County from over in Phenix City, and who was every bit as white as Bena, gave her a dose of hope. The woman’s only son had shot himself in the face with his daddy’s gun. She was the one that found him, folded in a knot on his bed, like somebody sleeping in a river of blood. She said her soul came loose from her body at the sight of her boy, self-murdered. It was the same as if he’d shot her too, left her to go through life dead-hearted. Then she swore that about a month later her dead son woke her up from a deep sleep to say he loved her. He wanted her to know it wasn’t her fault. I don’t blame you, he’d said, so stop blaming yourself.

She told Bena that at first she thought she was in a dream, but then she felt something heavy lift off her chest, like a piece of fallen furniture or the foot of a really big man—and suddenly she could breathe easy again, the way she used to before everything happened. She was not so crushed underneath anything anymore. She swore her boy coming to her like that gave her the only moment of true peace she’d known since the accident. But in this woman’s case, it was a one-time thing—no repeats. God didn’t enlist her to His eternal service like He did Mayfred. All God did was tell the woman she needed to divorce her boy’s father, which she’d been wanting to do for the longest time anyway. Then she moved to Baxter County to start her life all over. “One miracle,” the woman said, “can set you free forever.”

Bena hoped this was true. She was ready to believe it because she needed a last word with Bobby—to know for sure that his sin hadn’t backfired so bad that he’d completely lost his salvation. Bena herself had witnessed his being saved. He’d walked the aisle for Christ and the preacher shook his hand and patted him on the back. There was no doubt at the time that it was for real too. It had been all he could do not to sob his eyes out in front of everybody. He said so himself. As it was, his voice trembled and his hands shook so bad Bena thought for a minute he might be having a heart attack. It scared her. For days afterward he’d gotten so quiet it was spooky, maybe just from pure relief, knowing now he could quit worrying about living and dying and heaven and hell and put that energy toward something else. Knowing he was saved for all eternity. Some people said they could see a change in him afterward.

Bena had never been a religious person really. Originally religion was a favor she did for her mother to provide the woman some peace of mind. Everybody who wanted to be normal went to church. Bena’s friends were all going to church pretty much for the same reasons she was—because their mothers had got religion somewhere along the way and were sort of panicked about it. After a while it got to be a habit, church. The Sunday shoes, the church dresses, the little New Testament with her full name embossed on it in gold.

By the time she was grown Bena was taking church more seriously—some might say too seriously. Maybe she’d started to actually listen to the preacher or something, because the whole thing stirred feelings in her that made her unspeakably sad. This big world full of sinners, most of them wishing desperately to be something better than what they were. Herself included. It could rip you to pieces if you thought about it too much. So Bena had found a way to go through all the motions without dwelling on the big questions too much. In this way she was absolutely born to be Baptist because nearly everybody she knew operated pretty much the same way. It was just that now that Bobby was gone and the afterlife seemed her only hope of ever seeing him again, it made her want to truly believe all the things she’d only pretended to believe before. If Bobby could get himself let into heaven, then Bena ought to be able to too. For a while after Bobby’s funeral she got her mind set on it.

Bena went to bed night after night in a state of waiting, praying that Bobby’s spirit would come to her—just once. She’d say, Bobby, is heaven real? She’d say, Look what a mess you’ve made of everything! Some nights she fell asleep imagining Bobby and Lorraine appearing together, sitting on the edge of her bed, their wings fluttering like a couple of lovesick angels.

IT WASN’T UNTIL Bena got the call from Mrs. Rayfield more than a month later, saying that Lorraine had died without ever opening her eyes, that Bena began to comprehend death, the finality of it. It was only then, when she knew for sure that Lorraine was buried more than sixty miles away from where Bobby was buried, that she finally stopped looking for Bobby to come up the drive at the end of the day, blowing his horn like a public service announcement—or a warning to any children who had a talking-to coming that their daddy was home.

When Bena looked back at her marriage, for the life of her, she couldn’t remember a single time when she hadn’t been glad to see Bobby come home. He’d sling his briefcase on the coffee table, walk across the room in his wilted white short-sleeved shirt, loosening his necktie along the way, give her a little automatic kiss, and say, “How’s the Queen doing?” That was what he’d called Bena—the Queen.

He’d head for the bedroom and change into shorts and a T-shirt, and if it was summer he might mow the grass, or if it was winter he might rake the pine straw into mounds and cushion the flower beds with it. Or throw the ball with Joe and Eddie until Eddie got frustrated and started to cry. Or watch Sissy practice her baton twirling, figure eight after endless figure eight. Or talk Leslie into setting free the turtle she’d caught, convincing her that life in a cardboard box wasn’t worth living no matter how loved one was. If Leslie couldn’t be convinced then it was Bobby who dug the turtle’s grave and put the dogwood blossoms on it.

Bobby might fill up all the bird feeders with sunflower seed or pour kerosene on fire-ant beds dotting the yard or spray the wooden deck with water repellent to prevent rot or put sand on oil spills blighting the carport floor. Bobby was always doing something—with Elvis trailing him every step he took.

Bobby claimed he’d gotten Elvis for the kids, but Elvis had never belonged to anybody but Bobby. It was Bobby who picked him out of the litter. It was Bobby who named him. Bena had protested. Elvis? she’d said. No way. But Bobby had insisted, saying, Look how black his fur is. It’s so black it’s blue. Like Elvis’s shoe-polished hair. Bobby had always loved the story of Elvis putting black shoe polish all over his hair, then getting rained on, all that black washing down his face and staining his clothes and everybody laughing at him, thinking he was a weirdo. It was stories like that that made Bobby love Elvis. He loved him as much as any girl ever did, maybe more. It embarrassed Bena too, having a husband who worshiped Elvis like that. She’d wished Bobby would get more current.

After he got saved, sometimes on Sunday nights Bobby would put Elvis’s gospel music on the stereo and play it full blast. When the kids came and gawked at him in horror, saying, Daddy, stop it! he’d smile and say, The Catholics—now, they may have the Pope with that crown on his head, but us Baptists, we got Elvis. We got the King. He’d get tears in his eyes when Elvis sang “Amazing Grace,” like that was the one song in the world that made Bobby believe in the Holy Spirit for real. Bena had asked the preacher to play Elvis’s “Amazing Grace” at Bobby’s funeral too, which he did. After which she never could stand to listen to it again.

Ordinarily Bobby was not the kind of man who let himself get bored, although on rare nights he might just sit in the den and watch the news like he was in some kind of trance, waiting for Bena to get supper on the table. Bobby had been a casserole man. Chicken casserole was his favorite—the one with the spaghetti noodles, cheese, and almonds. Most men are meat-and-potatoes guys, but Bobby was different that way. He liked everything all mixed together from the beginning.

After supper sometimes Bobby would sit in the yard with Elvis under his chair and smoke a cigar. The cigar stink keeps the mosquitoes away, he liked to say. But it did not keep the children away. When the children were little they practiced their headstands and backbends in the grass where he sat, saying, Watch this, Daddy. Bobby would watch them tirelessly, his cigar smoke settling like a gray cloud around his head. Some nights he’d send the children to the kitchen saying, Go tell the Queen to come out here. Tell her there’s a handsome traveling salesman out here who’s craving her company. Minutes later the children would run back to him, saying, Daddy, Mama’s coming as soon as she cleans up the kitchen. But sometimes it took longer than she expected and Bobby would come inside before she could make her way outside. She regretted that now.

Bena had relived their early life from a million different angles since Bobby died. She remembered him the same way you remembered a magic trick—all the pleasure was in the bewilderment.

But she knew this. When Bobby had walked through the door at the end of the day, Elvis panting at his heels, Bena’s life had made perfect sense. The meatloaf she was sla