“Are you worried?” She hangs on the question, her eyes darting from him to Mater, as if her sanity depends on his response.
“I didn’t fly here for nothing.” He shifts, finding better footing in the dirt. “But it’ll be okay. No matter what. Mater’s had a good life.”
“I need a statistical probability.” Her nails are unpainted, and he watches them dig into the wood, the grip turning her knuckles white. “What chance is there for complications?”
Behind him, Royce chuckles, and the sun casts his shadow as he steps out of the stall and gives them some privacy.
“What difference does it make?” he asks Helena, meeting her dark solemn eyes.
“I’d like to know. I don’t want to be here if—” she gestures to Mater, who picks a terrible time to groan in discomfort.
“It’s okay,” he smiles. “She can’t understand you. If she dies?” he supplies helpfully. “Or if the calf does?”
“Yes.”
He rubs a hand over his chin, feeling the growth of stubble, a week’s worth of missed shaves. “Fifteen percent.” He uses his thumb to scratch the side of his check. “Fifteen percent chance of complications.”
“You flew us here on a fifteen percent chance?” She is irritated and suspicious, stepping away from the railing and crossing her arms in front of her chest. “There’s an eighty-five percent chance that she’s going to birth this baby cow just fine and we came all the way here for nothing?”
He raises an eyebrow at her, trying to understand the source of her agitation. “So… you want there to be a complication?”
“I want the truth.” She points an index finger toward Mater, who—as if on cue—bellows, her head swinging against the ground, her discomfort obvious. “Fifteen percent?!” She spits out the number as if it is ludicrous.
“It’s my wife’s cow.” He steps closer to Helena and lowers his voice. “Ellen used to ride on her back. She fed her tomatoes every harvest. I’d be here if there were a one-percent chance of anything going wrong.”
There is a long moment where Helena doesn’t respond, her eyes studying his as if reading the truth in them. Finally, she nods. “Okay. I just .... me coming here isn’t something I necessarily feel comfortable with. It was a big deal to me.” She finishes the statement with a wary look, as if he has lied or misled her in some way. And he wonders, in the moment before she steps back to the railing, her forearms flattening on the wood, her chin resting against the top of her hands, what happened in her life to make her so suspicious. Maybe she was just born that way. Maggie was that sort of child, one who peppered him with questions, never satisfied with his first response. Helena, even now, with her weight relaxed against the railing, has coiled muscles, an alert air. If he startles her, if he screams BOO, she will take off running. She’ll sprint through that barn and never look back.
I stretch out my legs and examine the toe of my flats, their paisley surface stained around the edges from dirt. I’ll have to throw them away. These jeans too. I shift in the dirt, finding a new spot to sit in, and look toward Mark. Between us, Mater shifts for the gazillionth time. She’s a very loud birther. Lots of wheezes and sighs, plenty of loud collapses onto the ground, then laborious struggles to her feet. The first four or five times, I was worried, my hands clenching into fists, body stiffening, as if I could will her into comfort. After a while, I followed Mark’s lead and relaxed. Mater, which is the dumbest name I’ve ever heard of for a cow, seems to be taking her time. At the moment, she is standing, her head down, her eyes closed.
“What if we miss it? When her water breaks?”
“You’re not gonna miss it.” His elbows rest on his knees, his butt on an upside-down bucket that’s already cracked along one edge. I watched when he sat on it, the plastic bowing a little under his weight, but the crack didn’t grow.
The silence returns, and it’s comfortable now, just the two of us here, Royce leaving fifteen minutes ago. Mater wheezes, and the sound joins the hum of crickets, the falling night interspersed with streaks of fireflies.
“You have a lot more fireflies here,” I say, watching one fade into the shadows. “We don’t have as many up north.”
“We got a lot of flying critters,” he drawls. “Stick around for summer and I’ll introduce you to a million and a half mosquitoes.”
“No thanks.” I won’t be alive in summer. I won’t ever feel the warmth of sunshine on my shoulder, or hear the sound of the ocean, feel the scratch of sand against my soles.
“Maggie always loved fireflies.” His head turns to the open door, and he waits, a chorus of them appearing, as if on stage.
“So did Bethany.” I smile sadly, remembering summer nights on our front porch, her feet darting across the front lawn, hands outstretched, swinging a jar through the air in an attempt to catch one as her prize.
“I got one.” She beamed at us, her tongue pushing the gap between her top and bottom teeth. “He was too slow, and I got him.” She held out the glass and I carefully took it, Simon and I moving apart, her tiny rump settling down on the step between us. “What should we name him?”
“Hmmm.” I wrinkled up my face, and soberly considered the small fly, which settled on the bottom of the glass. “What about Doug?” It’s a terrible name, intentionally picked. Bethany took the naming of items very seriously, and awarded extra attention to anything that ended in “y”.
“Doooouuuuug?” She stretched out the name like it was ridiculous, her eyebrows pinching together in the creation of an alarmed look. “That’s a terrible name!”
“Okay,” I allowed. “Then you pick one.”
“What about Lighty?” Simon interjected, and I tightened my hands on the glass, fighting the urge to reach over and smack him.
“Lighty!” Bethany cheered, and pulled the mason jar from my hands, raising it high in the air. “Great name, Daddy!”
It wasn’t a great name. It’s a terrible name, as bad as Doug, only not in an intentional, funny way. It was the most unimaginative name, supplied at a time when I was trying to grow Bethany’s creativity, and give her her own, original voice. ‘Lighty’ didn’t accomplish anything toward that goal. ‘Lighty’ was the personification of bland, average, uninspired normality.
I tried to smile, my lips pressed together in an attempt to fight a grimace from forming. “Do you know why the fireflies light up, Bethany?”
“Yep!” Her response had such confidence that I stalled, my eyes darting to Simon before returning to her. She didn’t know, not unless Simon told her.
“Tell me.” The request came out all wrong, hard and accusatory, as if Bethany was a defendant on the stand, and not a four-year-old with a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid on her elbow.
“It’s their mini flashlights,” she said solemnly. “It’s how they see in the dark.”
There is imagination, and then there was stupidity. I was a strong believer in the first, and a staunch disapprover of the second. It’s a point of contention between Simon and I, and I could see the stiffening of his spine as I shook my head. “No, Bethany.”
“Yes,” she insisted, stamping one of her shoes on the step. “Daddy said!”
“Bugs can see in the dark. They don’t need flashlights.”
“Then why do they have them?” she asked plaintively, as if I was old and stupid and she was humoring me. I hated that tone of her voice, the over-enunciated speech of an insolent child.
“It’s how they communicate. Mostly, it’s how they attract mates.” I pulled her onto my lap and lowered my voice, using the hushed whisper that she liked. “The males fly around, flashing their light and showing off. The females settle on branches or grasses and watch the males perform. If they see a male that they like, they’ll flash their light.” I pointed to the tree at the end of the drive, its branches silhouetted against the street light. “Watch the branches of that tree. See if you see any of the females flash their lights.”