Taking Care

Breakfast

THE phone rang at five in the morning. Clem woke with a grunt. Liberty rolled away from Willie’s arms and went into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Hello, Mother,” she mumbled. Clem, a large white Alsatian with one blind eye, took a long noisy drink from his water dish.

“I want to explain some of the incidents in my life,” her mother said. Her voice was clear and determined.

“Everything is all right, Mother. I love you. Daddy loves you.”

“I had a terrible dream about penguins tonight, Liberty.”

“Penguins are nice, Mother. They don’t do anyone any harm.”

“There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were all standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little aprons.”

What can she do about her mother? Liberty thinks. Drive up and take her out to lunch? Send her tulips by wire?

“That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful.”

“They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand.”

“You’re all right, Mother. It was just a dream and it’s gone now. It’s left you and I’ve got it.” Liberty rubbed Clem’s hard skull.

“Liberty, I have to tell you that I had another child, a child before you, a child before Daddy. She was two years old. I lost her, Liberty. I lost her on purpose.”

“Oh Mother,” begged Liberty, “I don’t want to know.”

“Can you remember yourself as a child, Liberty? You used to limp for no reason and sprinkle water on your forehead to give the appearance of fevers. You used to squeeze the skin beneath your eyes to make bruises.”

“Mother, I didn’t.”

“You were suicidal. You were always asking me suicide riddles like, What would happen if a girl was tied up in a rug and thrown off the roof?’ ‘What would happen if you put a girl in a refrigerator alongside the eggs and the cheese?’”

“None of those things are true,” Liberty said uncertainly.

“I believe that one can outwit Time if one pretends to be what one is not. I think I read that.”

Clem took a few disinterested laps from his water bowl. He drank to keep Liberty company.

“It’s almost Thanksgiving, Liberty. What are you and Willie going to do for Thanksgiving? I think it would be nice if you had turkey and made oyster stuffing and cranberry sauce. It broke my heart when you said you ate mullet last year. I don’t think you can do things like that, Liberty. Life doesn’t go on forever, you know. Your sister was born on Thanksgiving Day. She weighed almost nine pounds.”

Liberty was getting confused. The fluorescent light in the kitchen dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. She turned it off.

“I fell so in love with Daddy, I just couldn’t think,” Liberty’s mother said. “He was so free and handsome and I just wanted to be with him and have a love that would defy the humdrum. He didn’t know anything about Brouilly. I had kept Brouilly a secret from him.”

“Brouilly?” Liberty asked, not without interest. “That was my sister’s name?”

“It’s a wine. A very good wine actually. She was cute as the dickens. I was living in New York then and when I fell in love with Daddy, I drove Brouilly eighty-seven miles into the state of Connecticut, enrolled her in an Episcopalian day-care center under an assumed name and left her forever. Daddy and I sailed for Europe the next day. Love, I thought it was! For the love of your father, I abandoned my first-born! Time has a way, Liberty, of thumping a person right back into the basement.”

“You’ve never mentioned this before, Mother.”

“Do you know what your father says when I tell him I’m going to tell you? He says, ‘Don’t start trouble.’”

Liberty didn’t say anything. She could hear a distant conversation murmuring across the wires.

“I chose the Episcopalians,” her mother was saying tiredly, “because they are aristocrats. Do you know, for instance, that they are thinner than any other religious group?”

“I don’t know what to say, Mother. Do you want to try and find her?”

“What could I possibly do for her now, Liberty? She probably races Lasers and has dinner parties for twenty-five or something. Her husband probably has a tax haven in Campione.”

“Who was her father?” Liberty asked.

“He made crêpes,” her mother said vaguely. “I’ve got to go now, honey. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Bye-bye.”

Liberty hung up. The room’s light was now grey and Clem glowed whitely in it. A particularly inappropriate image crept open in her mind like a waxy cereus bloom: little groups of Hindus sitting around a dying man or woman or child on the river bank, waiting for death to come, chatting, eating, behaving in fact as though life were a picnic.

Liberty opened the refrigerator door. There was a jug of water aerating there, and a half-empty can of Strongheart. She poured herself a glass of water and spooned the Strongheart, a horse’s most paranoid imaginings, into Clem’s food bowl.

The phone rang. “I just want you to know,” her mother said, “that I’m leaving your father.”

“Don’t pay any attention to this, Liberty,” her father said on another extension. “As you must know by now, she says once a month that she’s going to leave me. Once a month for twenty-nine years. Even in the good years when we had friends and ate well and made love a dozen times a week she’d still say it.”

Liberty could hear her mother breathing heavily. They were both over five hundred miles away. The miracle of modern communication made them seem as close to Liberty as the kitchen sink.

“Once,” Daddy said, “why it couldn’t have been more than six months ago, she threw her wedding ring out into the pecan grove and it took a week and a half to find it. Once she tore up every single photograph in which we appeared together. Often, she gathers up all her clothes, goes down to the A&P for cartons, or worse, goes into Savannah and buys costly luggage, boxes her books and our French copper, makes a big bitch of a stew which is supposed to last me the rest of my days and cleans the whole damn place with a vacuum cleaner.”

“It’s obviously a cry for help, wouldn’t you say, Liberty?” her mother said.

“I don’t know why you’d want to call Liberty up and pester her and worry her sick,” Daddy said. “She has her own life.”

“That’s right,” her mother said, “excuse me, everything’s fine here. I made some peach ice cream yesterday.”

“Damn good peach ice cream,” Daddy said. “So, Liberty, how’s your own life. How’s that Willie treating you?”

“Fine,” Liberty said.

“Never could get anything out of Liberty,” her mother chuckled.

“You’re getting to be old married folks yourselves,” Daddy said. “What is it now, going on almost four years?”

“That’s right,” Liberty said.

“She’s a girl who keeps her own witness, that’s a fact,” her mother said.

“I want you to be happy, honey,” Daddy said.

“Thank you,” Liberty said.

“But honey, what is it you two do exactly all the time with no babies or jobs or whatever? I’m just curious, understand.”

“They adore one another,” Liberty’s mother said. “‘Adore’ is not in Daddy’s vocabulary, but what Daddy is trying to say is that a grandson might give meaning and significance to the fact that Daddy ever drew breath.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say at all,” Daddy said.

“They’re keeping their options open. They live in a more complex time. Keep your options open, Liberty! Never give anything up!” Her mother began to sob.

“We’d better be signing off now, honey,” Daddy said.

Liberty went into the living room and looked out the window at the light beginning its slow foggy wash over God’s visible kingdom, the kingdom being, in this case, an immense banyan tree which had extinguished all other vegetative life in its vicinity. The banyan was so beautiful it looked as though it belonged in heaven or hell, but certainly not on this earth in a seedy failed subdivision in the state of Florida.

She didn’t know about the ‘adore.’ ‘Adore’ didn’t seem to be in Willie’s vocabulary either. She supposed she could have told her Daddy about Willie saving people, making complete his incomprehension of his son-in-law. “He’s going through a crisis,” Daddy would say. “I wouldn’t rule out an affair either.” Once one got started saying things, Liberty knew, there were certain things that were going to get said back.

In the last six months, Willie had saved three individuals, literally snatched them from Death’s Big Grab. It was curious circumstance, certainly, but it had the feel of a calling to it. Willie was becoming a little occult in his attitudes. He was beginning to believe that there was more to life than love. Liberty didn’t blame him, but wished she had his vision.

The first person Willie had saved was a young man struck by lightning on the beach. Liberty had been there and seen the spidery lines the hit had made on the young man’s chest. Willie had administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation. A few weeks later, the man’s parents had come over to the house and given Willie a five-pound box of chocolate-covered cherries. The man’s mother had talked to Liberty and cried.

The next two people Willie had saved were an elderly couple in a pink Mercedes who had taken a wrong turn and driven briskly down a boat ramp into eight feet of water. The old woman wore a low-cut evening gown which showed off her pacemaker to good advantage.

“You’ve always been a fool, Herbert,” she said to the old man.

“A wrong turn in a strange city is not impossible, my dear,” Herbert said.

To Willie, he said, “Once I was a young man like you. I was an innocent, a rain-washed star, then I married this bat.”

“‘A rain-washed star’ is nice,” Liberty said when Willie told her.

Willie smiled and shook his head.

“Well, I guess I’ve missed the point again,” Liberty said.

“I guess,” Willie agreed.

Willie was making connections which Liberty was finding harder and harder to bypass. She believed in love and life’s hallucinations, and that every day was judgment day. It wasn’t enough anymore. Willie was getting restless with her, she knew. He felt she was bringing him down. His thoughts included her less and less, his coordinates were elsewhere, his possibilities without her becoming more actualized. This was marriage.

Liberty turned on the television without sound and picked up a piece of paper. She sat on the sofa and drew a line down the center of the paper and on the left side wrote things i would like and on the right things i would never do. She looked at the television where there was a picture of a plate with a large steak and a plump baked potato and some asparagus on it. The potato got up between the steak and the vegetable and a little slit appeared in it which was apparently its mouth and it apparently began talking. Liberty turned on the sound. It was a commercial for potatoes and the potato was complaining about the fact that everyone says steak and potatoes instead of the other way around. It nestled down against the steak again after making its point. The piece of meat didn’t say anything. Liberty turned off the television and regarded her list. She was sweating. She had closed all the windows late last night when she had heard the rain, now she cranked them open again. Deep inside the banyan, it still dripped rain. On one of its trunks, Teddy had carved I LOVE LIBERTY with his jackknife. Teddy was seven years old and fervently wished that Liberty were his mother. He often pointed out that they both had grey eyes and dark hair and a scar on one knee. She could easily be his mother, Teddy reasoned. He and Liberty had been friends for several years now. In the beginning, she had been paid by his mother for taking care of him, but now such an arrangement seemed unseemly. Teddy lived nearby in a large sunny house in a far more refined area of swimming pools and backyard citrus, but he preferred Liberty’s more gloomy locus. It was also his mother’s preference that he spend as much time as possible away from his own home. Janiella was a diabetic who did not allow her disability to get her down. She was a slender, well-read and passionate, if not nymphomaniacal, woman who enjoyed entertaining while her husband was away, which he frequently was. With Teddy she enforced a rigorous mental and physical schedule and was not very nice to him when he wet the bed.

When Teddy first began to wet the bed, Janiella had long discussions with him about the need for him to accept responsibility for his own bladder. When Teddy continued to refuse responsibility, Janiella began smacking him with a Whiffle bat every time she had to change the sheets. Then she decided on an alarm that would awaken him every three hours throughout the night. All the alarm has managed to do so far is to increase the number of Teddy’s dreams. Teddy dreams more frequently than anyone Liberty knows, he dreams and dreams. He dreams that he steals the single candy bar Janiella keeps in the house in the event she has an attack and has to have sugar. He dreams of Janiella crawling through their huge house, not being able to find her Payday.

When the phone rang again, Liberty walked quickly past it into the bathroom where she turned the water on in the shower. She stood in the small stall beneath the spray until the water turned cool. She turned off the water and stared uneasily at the shower curtain, which portrayed mildewed birds rising.

“Hey,” Willie said. He pushed the curtain back. His lean jaws moved tightly, chewing gum. Willie made chewing gum look like a prerequisite to good health. He was wearing faded jeans and a snug, faded polo shirt. His eyes were a faded blue. They passed over her lightly. Communication had indeed broken down considerably. Signals were intermittent and could easily be misread. Liberty didn’t know anything about him anymore, what he did when he wasn’t with her, what he thought. They had been together for six years. They had a little money and a lot of friends. There didn’t seem to be a plan.

“That was Charlie,” Willie said. “We’re going to have breakfast with him.”

They could never refuse Charlie when he wanted to eat. Charlie was an alcoholic who seldom ate. He was currently sleeping with Teddy’s mother and between his drinking and this unlikely affair, Charlie was a busy man. Liberty thought that Janiella was shallow and selfish and chic. She felt that it was ridiculous for her to be jealous of this woman.

As Liberty was dressing the phone rang again. It was Teddy, whispering.

“Is that tree still outside your house?” Teddy whispered. “Because I’m sure it was here last night. It was waving its arms outside my window, then it flopped away on its white roots. It goes anywhere it feels like going, that tree.”

“Trees aren’t like people,” Liberty said. “They can’t move around.” She felt her logic was somewhat insincere. “Dreams sometimes make you feel you can understand everything,” she said. Liberty herself never dreamed at night, an indication, she believed, of her spiritual torpor.

“Can I come over today, Liberty? Our pool is broken. It has a leak.”

“Certainly, baby, a little later, OK? Bring your snorkel and mask and we’ll go to the beach.”

“Oh, that’s fine, Liberty,” Teddy said.

Liberty can see him sitting in his small square room, a room in which everything is put neatly away. He jiggles a loose tooth and watches his speckled goldfish swimming in a bowl, swimming over green pebbles through a small plastic arch. Once, he had two goldfish and the bowl was in the living room, but his mother gave a party and one of her friends swallowed one. It was just a joke, his mother said.

Willie and Liberty got into their truck and drove to a little restaurant nearby called The Blue Gate. Clem sat on the seat between them and from the back he could pass for another person, with long pale hair, sitting there. At the restaurant, they all got out and Clem lay down beneath a cabbage palm growing in the dirt parking lot. The Blue Gate was a Mennonite restaurant in a little community of frame houses with tin roofs. Little living petunia crosses grew on some of the lawns. The Blue Gate was popular because the food was delicious and cheap and served in large quantities. Sometimes Liberty and Teddy would go there and eat crullers.

Inside, Charlie was waiting for them at a table by the pie display. He wore a rumpled suit a size too large for him and a clean shirt. His hair was combed wetly back, his face was swollen and his hands shook, nevertheless he seemed in excellent spirits. The last time Liberty had had the pleasure of Charlie’s company at table, he had eaten three peas separately in the course of an hour. He had told her fortune in a glass of water and then taken a bite out of the glass.

“Been too long, man,” Charlie said to Willie, shaking his hand. “Hi, doll,” he said to Liberty.

Charlie ordered eggs, ham, fried mush, orange juice, milk and coffee cake. “I love this place, man,” he said. “These are good people, these are religious people. You know what’s on the bottom of the pie pans? There are messages on the bottoms of the pie pans, embossed in the aluminum. Janiella got a pineapple cream cheese pie here last week and it said Wise men shall seek Him, man. Isn’t that something? The last crumbs expose a Christian message! You should bring a sweet potato pie home, Liberty, get yourself a message.”

“There are too many messages in Liberty’s life already,” Willie said. “Liberty is on some terrible mailing lists.”

“Yeah,” Charlie nodded. “Yesterday, I got a letter from Greenpeace. They’re the ones who want to stop the slaughter of the harp seals, right? Envelope had a picture of a cuddly little white seal and the words Kiss This Baby Good-Bye. You get that one, Liberty?”

“Yes,” Liberty said.

“You know what those Greenpeace guys did one year? They sprayed green dye all over the seals. Fashion fuckers don’t want any green baby seal coats, right!” Charlie laughed his high cackling laugh. The Mennonites glanced up from their biscuits and thin pink gravy.

Liberty ordered only coffee and looked at Charlie, at his handsome ruined face. He was a Cajun. His mother still lived in Lafayette, Louisiana. She was a “treater” whose specialty was curing warts over the phone.

“Janiella has a fur coat,” Charlie said. “She has lots of lousy habits. She never shuts doors for example. I have to tell you what happened. I was there yesterday, right? I’m beneath the sheets truffling away and her kid comes in. He’s forgotten his spelling book. His spelling book! ‘Mommy,’ he says, ‘have you seen my spelling book?’ I’m crouched beneath the rosy sheets. My ears are ringing! I try to be very still, but I’m gagging, man, and Janiella says sweetly, ‘I saw your spelling book in the wastebasket,’ and the kid says, ‘It must have fallen in there by accident,’ and Janiella says, ‘You are always saying that, Ted. You are always placing things you don’t like in the wastebasket. I found that lovely Dunnsmoor sweater I gave you in the wastebasket. That lovely coloring book on knights and armor from the Metropolitan Museum was in the wastebasket also.’ ‘I’m too old for coloring books,’ the kid says. Picture it, man, they are having a discussion. They are arguing fine points.”

Liberty did not want to picture it. Breakfast had been placed before them on the table. Charlie looked at the food in surprise.

“Well?” Willie said.

Charlie seemed to be losing his drift. He kept looking at his food as though he were trying to read it.

“So what happened?” Willie insisted. “Finally.”

“Well, I don’t know, man. The future is not altogether scrutable.”

“Janiella and Teddy,” Willie said, glancing at Liberty. “The spelling book.”

Charlie giggled. “I fell asleep. The last thing I heard was the kid saying, ‘I thought Daddy was playing in Kansas City.’ I passed out from the heat, man.”

“Playing in Kansas City?” Willie asked. He poured syrup on his fried mush. Liberty reached over and scooped up a bit for herself with her coffee spoon.

“He’s a baseball player. He catches fly balls and wears a handlebar mustache and spits a lot. I think he suspects something. They’ve got this immense swimming pool wherein Janiella and I often fool around and there was this little rubber frog that drifted around in it, trailing chlorine from his bottom. Cute little frog with a happy smile, his rubber legs crossed and his rubber eyes happy? Well Mr. Mean came home last weekend and took his twelve-gauge and blasted that poor little froggy to smithereens.”

Liberty grimaced. Willie asked Charlie, “Who does Teddy think you are, a visiting uncle?”

“We’ve never met. I’ve only laid eyes on him in a photo cube. Janiella wants to keep him out of the house and she’s got him busy every minute. He has soccer practice, swim team, safe boating instruction. He’s hardly ever at home. After school, he takes special courses in computer language, calligraphy, backgammon. Poor little squirt comes staggering home, his brain on fire. I think of myself as a fantastic impetus to his learning.”

“Liberty’s not happy with this situation at all,” Willie said.

“Liberty’s all right,” Charlie grinned, showing his pale gums. “Liberty’s a great girl.” The waitress arrived and warily placed a pint carton of milk by Charlie’s right hand. The carton of milk had a straw sticking out of it. “Oh look at that!” Charlie exclaimed. “I love this place. You gotta get a pie, Liberty. Bring it home to Clem. He’d scarf it down and get some words. Be zealous and repent. Dog’d go wild!”

Liberty reached across to Willie’s plate and spooned up another small piece of mush.

“That’s extremely irritating,” Willie said. “You never order anything and then you eat what I order.”

Liberty blushed.

“Liberty!” Charlie cried, “eat off my plate, I beseech you! Let’s mix a little yin and yang!” He speared a piece of coffee cake with his fork and fed it to her.

“it’s just one of those things,” Willie said, “that has been going on for years.” He looked unhappily at his plate.

“Really, man, you’re losing energy with these negative emotions. You’re just going dim on us, man,” Charlie said.

“All right,” Willie said to Liberty, “let’s talk about you for awhile. Tell me something you’ve never told me before.”

“She’s going to say Oavid,’” Charlie said. He brushed his fingers lightly across the veins in Liberty’s wrist.

“David?” Liberty asked. “Who is David?”

“David is the boy you never slept with,” Willie said. “David is your lost opportunity.”

“I think we’re talking too loud,” Charlie yelled. “These are polite, God-fearing people. Their babies come by UPS. Big brown Turtle-Waxed trucks turn into their little lanes. They have to sign for them, the babies. The babies grow up to be just like these old geezers here. Nevertheless, it’s better to get babies by UPS. The sound of two bodies yattering together to produce a baby is a terrible thing really.”

“With David you would be another kind of woman,” Willie said. “At this very moment, you could be with David, cuddling David. After you cuddled, you could arise, dress identically in your scarlet union suits, chino pants, ragg socks, Bass boots, British seaman pullovers and down cruiser vests and go out and remodel old churches for use as private residences in fashionable New England coastal towns.”

“But David,” sighed Charlie, “is missing and presumed at rest.”

“Change the present,” Willie said. “Through the present, change the future and through the future, the past. Today is the result of some past. If we change today, we change the past.”

Charlie shook his head. “Too much to put on a pie plate, man. Besides, it doesn’t sound Christian.”

“If you were another kind of woman,” Willie said, “you could be married to Clay, the lawyer, dealing in torts. You’d have two little ones, Rocky and Sandy. They’d have red hair and be hyperactive. They’d be the terror of the car pool. Clay would have his nuts tied.”

“Oh please, man,” Charlie exclaimed.

“You and Clay would fly to your vacations in your very own private plane. You’d know French. You’d gain a small reputation as a photographer of wildflowers, really bringing out the stamens and pistils in a studious but quite improper way. Women would flock to the better department stores in order to buy the address books in which your photos appeared. With menopause would come a change in faith, however. You’d get bored with your recipes and your BMW. You’d stop taking dirty pictures. You’d divorce Clay.”

“I knew it, I knew it!” shouted Charlie. “There he’d be with his useless nuts!”

“You’d become a believer in past lives. You’d become fascinated with other forms of intelligent life. You’d see that Christ had returned as a humpback whale. You’d become involved in the study of whale language.”

“Oh, I love whales too, man,” Charlie said, spilling coffee down the front of his pink button-down shirt. “They are poets in tune with every aspect of their world. They sing these songs, man.”

“You’d curse the house in Nantucket that Rocky and Sandy had spent so many happy summers in.”

“Ahhh, Nantucket, built on blood. Let’s abandon this subject,” Charlie said. He looked sadly at his shirt. “I’ve got to throw up, man, the happy vomiter has got to leave you now.” He sighed and remained seated. “God is unrelenting and bitchier than a woman, I swear. What do you say, Liberty?”

“Liberty’s song is a little garbled,” Willie said.

“Aren’t ours all,” Charlie said graciously. “Ubble-gubble.” He smiled at Liberty, who tried to meet his thoughtful, thickened gaze. She wished that she could watch him without being seen. The considerable fact that she was attracted to him made her feel morbid, things i would like, she thought, things i would never do. She had to get started on that list.

“Except for Clem’s song,” Charlie was saying. The dog was visible from their table, lying beneath the palm tree, his paws crossed, yawning. A sheriff’s deputy sat nearby in his cruiser, looking at him as though he’d like to write out a ticket. “Clem’s song is serene. How’d you get such a great dog, Liberty?”

“He came in on the night air and settled on her head as she slept,” Willie said.

“Gubble-ubble,” Charlie said.

“He was in the envelope with the marriage license,” Willie said. “We sprinkled a little water on him and he puffed up and was made soul.”

“Leave this creep and come away with me,” Charlie said.

Willie said, “We got him from the Humane Society. He ate a child. The police impounded him but what could they do, after all, this isn’t the Middle Ages, we don’t hang animals for crimes. And he was an innocent, a victim himself, belonging to a schizophrenic, anorectic unwed mother who kept leaving her infant son alone with him, unfed, in her fleabag apartment.”

Charlie said, “I mean it. I love married women. I treat them right. Your blood will race, I’m telling you. I’m also a cook. I make great meat loaf, no, forget meat loaf, I’ll make gumbo. I’m third in line for two acres of land in St. Landry Parish. Only two people have to die and it’s all mine. It’s got a chinaberry tree on it. We’ll go to cockfights and pole the bayous and drink beer and eat gumbo.”

“Actually,” Willie said, “she found him sitting in the road. He’d been hit by a car. His eye was in a ditch of water hyacinths, being examined by two ducks. Blood all over the place. What a mess.”

“Everything’s so relative with you, man. I don’t know how you make it through the day,” Charlie said. He gazed at Liberty, absorbed.

“A linear life is a tedious life,” Willie said. “Man wasn’t born to suffer leading his life from moment to moment.”

“I love quiet married women,” Charlie said. “Their lack of fidelity thrills me. But I am coming to the conclusion that Janiella talks too much. Even in situ, she’s gabbing away. And she’s into very experimental stuff. There are not as many ways of making love as people seem to believe. Janiella may not be for me, actually.”

“I’m splitting,” Willie announced.

“I think you’re making a fetish out of the real world,” Charlie said, looking at Willie glumly. He rubbed his face hard with his hands. He wanted a drink, Liberty knew. He had that look in his dark eyes. “And seriously, man, about these people you’ve been saving, I don’t know, I mean about those old people particularly. I would allow them to go under if I were you. They might buy another Mercedes and take a wrong turn this time right into school recess. See them! Barreling through shrieking groups of shepherd’s-pie-stained Bubble-Yum T-shirts, hand-tooled pointy-toed cowboy boots and small rucksacks stickered with hearts, flattening little hands holding baby bunnies, little sunburned arms …” He shook his head. “And that bugger you saved …”

“Bugger?” Willie looked rattled.

“You saved a bugger,” Charlie said morosely.

“He saved someone who had called his mother a ‘bugger’ is what I said,” Liberty said. “That’s what the mother told me.”

“You’re so literal,” Willie said to Liberty. “What the young man said to me was that getting struck by lightning didn’t feel like getting laid.”

“Well, now that’s expected,” Charlie said. “It’s well known that people say mechanical things under certain circumstances.”

“Liberty prefers not to read between the lines,” Willie said. “The clearly visible is exhausting enough, she feels.”

“Liberty’s a great girl,” Charlie said. “A girl of romantic sensibility, a girl who cares.”

“Liberty is a highly depressed individual,” Willie said.

“Whatever,” Charlie said cheerfully. “Building, building.”

Willie stood up and leaned slightly toward Liberty, his hands on the table. His hands were tanned and strong and clean. His wedding band was slender. Liberty remembered the wedding clearly. It had taken place in a lush green tropical forest in the time of the dinosaurs. “I’ve got to shake myself a little loose,” he said, “do you want the truck?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Just a few days,” Willie said. “Later,” he said to Charlie. He left.

“A butterfly vanishes from the world of caterpillars,” Charlie said.

Liberty saw Clem get up and look after the truck as it drove away. He trotted over to the restaurant and peered in, resting his muzzle on a window box of geraniums. Liberty waved to him.

“He can’t see that,” Charlie said. “Animals live in a two-dimensional world. For example, like with roads? To a dog, each road is a separate phenomenon which has nothing in common with another road.”

“That sounds about right,” Liberty said. She watched Clem nibble on a pink geranium. His bad eye was like a smooth stone.

“There are lots of roads,” Charlie said. He picked up her hand and kissed her palm. “I love you,” he said.

Liberty smiled. “Janiella’s your married woman.”

He shook his head and blew softly on her palm. “There’s only you,” he said.

“You’re a bottle man,” Liberty said.

“Liberty!” a child’s voice called. It was Teddy, standing by the bakery counter. He hurried over, shoelaces flapping, holding a waxed bag. “Mommy sent me here for rolls because Daddy’s home and they’re fighting.” He sat on Liberty’s lap while she tied the laces.

Charlie closed his eyes.

“Who is that?” Teddy demanded.

“My man,” Charlie said, “we were just discussing running away together.”

“I want to go too,” Teddy said. “You won’t make me memorize poetry, will you?”

“What kind of monsters do you think we are?” Charlie said.

“My mother makes me do a lot of memorizing. I’m going to go to boarding school next year. ‘Marriage needs room,’ she says.” Teddy pointed to a shelf on the far wall of items for sale — palm canes, dolls, cream pitchers in the shape of cows. “I bought my mother one of those for her birthday,” Teddy said, pointing at a cow.

Charlie’s long face looked sad. “That touches me,” he said. “I have been touched. I have been reached now for sure and I suddenly see things clearly. This is us,” he said, touching their arms. “We should do something about us.”

“Did this ever happen before?” Teddy asked, his arms lightly encircling Liberty’s neck. “It all seems a little familiar.”

“A very common feeling in childhood,” Charlie said. “Stuff that should have happened but didn’t has to keep trying to happen until it does.”

Liberty shook her head and smiled.

“Look at this pretty lady smile,” Charlie said to Teddy. “I love this lady. I’ve loved her for a long time. It’s been a secret just between us but now you know too.”

“I want to run away with you and Liberty and Clem,” Teddy said.

“A beautiful woman, a smart dog, a little kid and yours truly,” Charlie said. “We can do it! We will become myths in the minds of others. They will say about us,” he leaned forward and lowered his voice, “that we all went out for breakfast and never returned.”

“Good,” Teddy said.

“So where shall we go?” Charlie said. He kissed Liberty’s face. The line of people waiting to be seated, old women in bonnets, holding one another’s hands, looked at them in alarm.

“There’s no place to go,” Liberty said.

“There are many places to go,” Charlie said. “Hundreds.”

“Let’s make a list, I love lists!” Teddy said.

“We’re the nuclear unit scrambling out, the improbable family whose salvation is at hand,” Charlie said. “We’ll go to Idaho, British Columbia, New Zealand, the Costa del Sol. We’ll go to Nepal. No, forget Nepal, all those tinkly little bells would drive us crazy. What do you say, we’ll go to Paraguay. That’s where Jesse James went.”

“That’s where the Germans went,” Liberty said. “Jesse James just died.”

“You’re right,” Charlie said. “It wasn’t Paraguay. It was Patagonia where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went.” He was fidgeting now. His dark eyes glittered.

“They were outlaws,” Teddy said.

“They were outlaws,” Charlie said. “Successful outlaws.”

“Why are you crying?” Teddy asked Liberty. “Are you crying?”

“We’ve got to move along, it’s later than we think,” Charlie said. “How about some lunch?”