The Floating Cradle

Five

"Having a good Christmas Eve?" Gilberto chortles as I pitch another forkful of dung into the wheelbarrow. I've never had a problem with getting my hands dirty, but knowing that Pete's inside watching anime and making cookies with Mama makes it feel like a cosmic injustice (not that I would enjoy doing either of those things). My only consolation is that I saw him hobbling last night before bed; I hope I broke his toe.

"I'll bet Pete's wearin' Felicity's frilly pink apron."

"Is it true she whupped him for painting his fingernails?" Gil asks, glancing around to make sure Lyle and my father aren't around. I've got along with Gil since my father hired him a few years back; he's in his early twenties, short and round-faced, and is always down to gossip.

"Yep. And she used industrial-grade turpentine to get it off," I say. "Took some of his skin with it. But she don't know about the toes."

We have a good laugh. Our phones buzz in our pockets: lunch.

"Turn that down, won't you," Mama says, setting a plate of sandwiches in the middle of the table. Lyle mutes the little TV next to the toaster, where a reporter is split-screen with footage of a foreign dictator fulminating against the decadence of the West.

"Looks a bit like a bullfrog, doesn't he?" Felicity asks dispassionately of the little man. Mr. Clarksberg—the kindest, most angelic person this side of the Mississippi—gave her the day off, and she has spent the morning making a show of arranging tissue-wrapped boxes under the tree, as though we hadn't ordered all our own presents weeks ago.

"Where's Dan?" my father asks after Mama says grace, counting heads around the packed table. Felicity takes a sandwich, careful not to let her elbow brush Blake's, which is caked with dried mud.

"Caught the flu just in time for Christmas," Mama sighs. "I'll fix him somethin' later, if he can eat it."

Daddy assumes a frown; he has never laid up in bed in his life, not even that time his appendix burst, or that other time he sliced his shoulder to the bone on barbed wire. He glances with tired eyes at Pete, who is removing the tomato from his sandwich and piling it on the side of his plate. When he looks over at me, the ends of his mustache turn up.

"How 'bout you and I take a drive to Murray's and pick up the turkey, eh Bug?" he suggests.

The truck's radio is spewing the same alarmist story as the TV when my father starts the engine, but I switch it to the Christmas carols station. We rumble down our long driveway onto a straight road cutting through broad brown fields. Every now and again we'll wave at another farmer tractoring past or tending to his fence. I'm struck with the overwhelming urge to tell Daddy about the pills—to fess up entirely—but I suppress it. After Christmas, I'll flush the sock and tell Cayden to shove what's left up his stupid, perfectly shaped ass.

The Murrays' coonhounds start baying when we pull into the driveway, straining at the ends of their chains, exceptional jowls a-quiver. Mr. Murray sees us pull in and heads out back to fetch our bird from the shed.

"A fat hen and a merry Christmas to you," he says to my father as I roughhouse with the dogs. Suddenly the dogs freeze, turn, and sniff the air; a few raise their hackles. A car—a rental by the looks of it, too clean—speeds past on the main road, but otherwise the world seems unremarkable.

"Maybe they smell a storm rollin' in," Mr. Murray speculates, though he sounds doubtful.

I watch the dogs, still as sentinels, grow small and disappear behind the house as we back out of the driveway. Santa Claus is Coming to Town patches in and out over the radio.

"The trouble'll be if she starts laborin' tomorrow—there's supposed to be a cold snap, and I know Mama won't want no calf in her livin' room on Christmas day," my father is saying, unaware of my growing unease. The air feels heavy, watchful; whatever moved the dogs—a sound or smell, I suppose—is invisible to me, but very much present, like a ghost riding alongside us in the cabin, like a poisonous gas. Like a lie. To my surprise, my father reaches over and pats my hand.

"I know, Lovebug," he says in as soft a voice as he is capable. "It ain't easy on any of us. Nobody wins in divorce."

My spinning world suddenly rights itself. What?

"Sure," is all I can think to say.

"But they don't want nothin' said aloud till after Christmas, for Pete. I think a clean break is best, but it's their business," he continues.

We spend the rest of the drive in silence. I am grappling less with emotions and more with paradigms, the idea that Pete could ever deserve pity, that Felicity's status as a square peg is not just some running joke but a problem with real consequence. The closest I come to sadness is frustration at the idea of Lyle and Felicity ending a union as permanent and longstanding as my existence, as though someone should have asked my permission first. But nobody ever has any say at the beginning of herself, which gives you a pretty good idea of everything else to come, if you think about it.

My father and I bounce up the long driveway to see a white sedan bearing Missouri plates parked next to Felicity's Buick. He parks the truck without saying anything, retrieves the turkey, and makes toward the front door. I follow close behind.

The kitchen is in a Mexican standoff; I don't remember entering, or the door slamming shut behind us, but in a second Daddy and I are a part of it. Mama is standing at the far end of the table as though she has just risen from her chair. Lyle and Felicity flank her, then Gil and Blake like some parody of a Norman Rockwell. Pete has crept away from his place to hide between Blake and his mother, as though seeking a shield. Dan stands agape and puffy-eyed in the doorway to the living room, a thermometer dangling from his lips.

To the left of the vestibule, which my father and I now occupy, is my sister Allie, who I have not seen since I was nine years old.

To her left, a tantum.