20

Number One Criminal

THE NEXT DAY, The Daily Darwin Gazette, the slightly more grown-up paper in town, had joined the conversation on the lately discovered late Dempsey poems, the letters and editorial pages devoting themselves to the pitiably contemptible figure of Flora Dempsey, Literary Executioner. In a town where salamander fatalities and white bread were cause for alarm, clearly there was a shortage of news.

“I see you’re none too popular these days,” Gus teased her when she went in with Larks to buy the Gazette and milk that morning. “I do love to see the Darwinians tie themselves in knots over some sonnet. Endless books about other books—did Shakespeare write those plays or did he not? That kills me. Can’t they leave the poor guy alone?

“The old man would be proud,” Gus went on. “He took a kind of pride in his enemies, didn’t he? Maybe a little too much pride.” That was a new perspective: Her father would be proud. “‘I’m going to take a lot of people down with me, Gus,’ he liked to say. You know. One of those funny lines of his.”

Flora hurried from the store. It was the second time she’d made the Darwin news, and though the first time, her parents had tried to conceal it from her, she had seen the photos of the fire escape, the headlines warning citizens of dempsey’s daughter’s dangerous games. This time around, the commentators thoughtfully wondered whether Flora was “fighting the patriarchal establishment of conventional modes of publication,” and suggested “the work be released into a ‘creative commons’ where it could be shared—altered, even—by all Lewis Dempsey’s literary admirers.” Another argued she, “like the burgeoning movement of evangelicals in town, stood to poison their community of openness and tolerance with the arsenic of artistic censorship.” A third psychologized that “with her troubled childhood,” it should come as no surprise “that she is not a capable steward of her father’s legacy.” Others speculated on the legacy itself: Dempsey had written an epic, a modern-day Iliad, or an homage to Thomas Hardy in verse.

Who were these people, these experts? Her mother’s line had been that they hadn’t suffered enough, but maybe it was the opposite; maybe their petty obsessions were a balm for their daily suffering. Flora had stopped on the common to read about herself, the slanderous paper spread awkwardly on the grass before her, Larks moaning with stoical patience, and when Flora finally looked up, she saw Paul Davies leaving his office. Was he coming toward her? She did not want to find out. She did not want to be scolded, or asked to apologize. She folded the paper messily and pulled Larks back toward home. Larks stared, unbudging, in a state of disbelief—first gratuitous outdoor paper reading, and now they were not going on their full walk around the campus?

“Not today,” she said. “If you have a complaint, Larks, you’ll have to get in line. The complaints department is closed.”

At the house, an envelope had been slid beneath the door. Flora paused before bending to pick it up. A death threat from some Darwinian crazy? A petition to release the poems? But then she recognized Carpenter’s twirling handwriting from his chalkboard notes. She opened it and read:

So that was it. Far from being a perfect reader, her father had been unkind, a destructive reader for Sidney Carpenter. His meanness the start of the troubles between them. It was possible Carpenter was deceiving her, but it seemed unlikely he would invent a story so disparaging of his own work. It was moving, Carpenter’s humility—“he rightly saw very little of merit in mine.” Had her father been explicit in his contempt for Carpenter’s reading of Yeats, or had it merely been implied in that way intelligent people fool themselves into thinking their transparency is opaque to others less savvy? Had he convinced himself he was doing his rival a favor, preventing the premature publication of such blatantly flawed work?

But if Carpenter was not the Witness Deep Throat, who was? Cynthia, as Madeleine suspected? It was so sleazy and desperate, so malicious, leaking a story to a college newspaper, and Cynthia, for all her aggravating enthusiasms and relentless campaigning, had seemed to bear no malice. Perhaps Flora had read her wrong. Or maybe Cynthia was still deranged with grief, still suffering from whatever had compelled her to break into the house and steal her lover’s toothbrush that first night. The publication of the poems would be one way to keep Lewis Dempsey alive. There would be readings; there would be discourse! Maybe, in Cynthia’s mind, Flora was killing him all over again, or at least insisting he stay dead. Malice, then, would be commensurate with the crime.

Flora would not sit around awaiting the next batch of accusations. Larks was right in bemoaning his indoorness. It was the perfect day for a bike ride: new, breezy, ice blue. She needed to be more active, to take action. Such eagerness, such suddenness was not mania—it was health. First, though, she would need to break into the basement of Paul’s apartment building in town to reclaim the old Peugeot—surprisingly easy, it turned out. The building manager even helped her carry the bicycle up the stairs when she assured him it was hers. She looked so innocent, Flora-Girl. She was the perfect thief.

From Paul’s, she headed toward campus. She passed the President’s House and the well-groomed, well-watered Darwin grounds, and the little house she’d shared with her mother, and her old elementary school. She was moving distinctly in the direction of Cynthia’s house. It would be good to talk to Cynthia. Cynthia—the snitch, the anonymous source. Flora needed answers. But Cynthia wasn’t home, and she wasn’t in the garden, either, Flora discovered after walking around the back of the house. She’d expected something more exuberant, more verdant, and less weeded, and though it was early in the season and the garden might yet spring to life, perhaps she was observing here some significant neglect, evidence Cynthia was depressed or unwell. Had the woman completely lost her mind? Was that the reason behind the betrayal?

The house—small and white, with green-black shutters—wasn’t the right house for her. The windows too small, like piggy eyes. And Cynthia was right, it was dark inside, the day’s brightness held at bay, Flora observed as she pushed open the back door, which brought her directly into the collage of Cynthia’s living room. No locked doors in Darwin. Darwin was perfectly safe. Flora herself the number one criminal.

“Cynthia?” she called out. “Hello?”

The house was empty but for Andy and Pablo. They appeared at the door, circling her, tails at attention. There was something reptilian in their silent slinking.

“Hello, strange cats,” Flora said. As she shut the door behind her, the fear nagged of being caught, quite different from the sense of doing wrong. After all, she just wanted to look around. And Cynthia had stolen her father’s papers, broken into his house on the day of his death, taken the early drafts and kept them from her for many months. Cynthia had rushed her. Cynthia had said to the Darwin College Woodstein who broke the story, “It’s sad, really. Those poems are the only hold she has on her father.” Without Cynthia, no poems—her father’s chiding inscription. No poems, no transformation to harpy in the local press.

When she’d come for Thanksgiving, Flora had been unable to see the areas of interest—the upstairs. It was a rabbit warren of little rooms. There were three doors off a small hall—one to a bathroom, one to a guest room, and one to Cynthia’s bedroom. Her bed was covered by a beautiful antique quilt, the pattern slightly irregular. It was unusual to see things authentically old today—people bought new distressed wood, or denim, the artful appearance of age an added feature like any other, as though time could be contrived in that way, made up on the spot. But Cynthia, like any good WASP with good taste, seemed to have curated her rooms with irreplaceable old objects. Things with stories, and pedigrees. There was a glass of water and a water pitcher by the bed, of the kind of thick glass that distorts, and a stack of books on the side table, which was really a small turquoise chest, the paint chipping to reveal other incarnations below. A new biography of Thomas Hardy, bookmarked, triumphed atop the stack.

In the closet, every color was accounted for, every shoe sensible and heel-less. In the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, a migraine medicine Flora’s mother also took. On the wall above the tub, framed pinups from old magazines—of course—and on the sink a red-and-white china pitcher from which fat makeup brushes burst forth, bouquetlike. Under the sink, a basket of pink rollers, of the sort you saw little old ladies walking around in, in the city, doing errands. Flora’s grandmother, too, had curled and smoothed the front of her hair with one giant pink roller every morning of her life.

In the guest room, there was a small bookshelf filled with children’s books with worn spines, their bold covers faded by the sun or years. Had Cynthia bought them in anticipation of a visit from a friend’s child? Or was this where the nieces and nephews stayed? Surely, as one of five siblings, she had many of those. On the top shelf, next to the pea green of The Secret Garden, were the Little House books, with their yellow covers—nine paperbacks fit snugly into their cardboard case. Flora slid them out, one after another, and flipped through the pages. They were ghosts, the books of one’s youth.

She remembered it was back downstairs, past the bathroom, where Cynthia had disappeared so eagerly that night and returned with the manuscript clutched in her arms like some found chunk of Rosetta stone. And indeed, there Flora found the tiny study, filled with grown-up, scholarly books, the tall art books down on the lower shelves, the books losing height as the shelves gained it. On the desk, a dictionary on a wooden pedestal, opened to the M’’. The desk was an old sewing table converted now to allow for different sorts of women’s work. There were no drawers, everything on display. Nestled into a neat bundle beside the original manuscript were two letters her father had written. Flora fingered them, though she knew better now: She had learned the punishing lesson of reading his most private words. Beneath those was a watercolor he had made, with Cynthia depicted as a cat planting bulbs in the garden, himself a Larks-like dog watching her from the hammock, over the top of his book. So he had evolved over the years from mouse to dog, but the women of his life were all hopelessly feline? Her mother, and Cynthia, and Flora, too, symbolically interchangeable?

One of the real cats—Pablo or Andy, she couldn’t tell which—jumped up onto the table next to her, startling her. Was that a car door she heard? She’d stayed too long. She stacked the letters and watercolor more or less as they had been, then picked up the manuscript with its twilight blue inscription and headed toward the back door. She could slip out there, but stupidly she’d left her bike out front by the driveway. What if someone had seen it? And as she placed the poems into the straw basket of her bicycle, she noticed Cynthia’s neighbor noticing her from inside the open garage. Flora waved, as waving was the done thing, and pedaled away.

But as she rode down Cynthia’s quiet residential street toward town, the wind picked up, lifting her hair, and first one and then two pages of the manuscript. Three from the end blew off in quick succession. Flora stopped and hurried after them. Another flew away. She chased her father’s papers through a meadow by the side of the road. Like a kid chasing butterflies, but clumsier, and less cheerful.

“Goddamn it,” she said out loud to herself. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” It was hard not to ascribe a willfulness to the pages as they eluded her. They were gleeful. They somersaulted and nipped one another’s heels. “Come back,” she called after them. Her ineptitude was boundless. “Fuck these fucking poems.” There had been a quiet dignity in the act of theft she had just committed. Now all was undone. The dignity replaced with absurdity. When did sadness simply become absurd? She ran, and tamped down the paper with her feet. She caught every page but one, one Lewis Dempsey original masterpiece lost to Darwin’s vernal breezes. The remaining pages looked windswept and stepped on, as they had been, the manuscript inscribed now also by the elements.

On the ground by the edge of the road, Flora found a good-size rock and placed it in the basket, pinning the poems down. What was she going to do with the cursed papers? She’d stolen them without thinking, to prove she could, maybe; but what pleasure would keeping them bring? None. She would return them to Cynthia’s. Pretend this had never occurred. The elision and the soiling would not go unnoticed, but maybe Cynthia would think it was she who had somehow misplaced the page, it was she who had chased them through a field and trampled them. And if one page was missing, it mattered little to take one more. Flora flipped through till she found the poem “The Wizard.” That one she would keep. She folded the page neatly in quarters and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans. She got on her bike and pedaled back to Cynthia’s.

A Darwin Campus Security cruiser was parked in the driveway, a compact uniformed man standing, talking to Cynthia’s neighbor. Flora stopped, and the neighbor pointed. She was a large woman, hunched and wide and over eighty, Flora guessed. Still, it seemed unlikely she could outpedal the cruiser on the old Peugeot.

“Excuse me, miss,” the officer called over. “Can we have a moment of your time?”

Flora walked her bike toward them.

“Miss …”

“Dempsey, Flora Dempsey.”

“Any relation to our former President Dempsey?” he asked.

“My father, yes.”

“What do you know. Very pleased to meet you, Flora Dempsey.” He took off his sunglasses and shook her hand. He did not introduce himself. His eyes were too close together, which made him look either threateningly stupid or benign and lenient. “Mrs. Bianchi here was just telling me she saw a young lady with a bicycle—who may have, in fact, been you—walking around the back of her neighbor’s house. Would you know anything about that?”

“She knows about it, because it was her,” Mrs. Bianchi contributed. “I recognize her little pink sweater. And she was more sneaking than walking.”

“Yes, that was me you saw,” Flora said to the woman, who had the musk of near death about her. “Cynthia Reynolds, your neighbor—she and my father … she’s practically my stepmother. We’re practically family.” She turned to the Darwin cop. “I was supposed to meet her here to pick something up—these papers—but she was running late and she told me to go ahead in and pick them up. The back door was unlocked, so that’s what I did, what I was doing, when Mrs. Bianchi saw me.”

Mrs. Bianchi did not look satisfied. “You see someone you don’t know snooping around and you worry. You say you’re family, but I’ve never seen you before. We’ve had burglaries around here. People are foolish not to lock their doors.”

“I’m sorry I worried you. But I assure you I’m not a burglar.”

“Petty larceny is a problem in the town of Darwin,” the officer informed them, hands on belt. “Maybe if we gave Ms. Reynolds a call now, to verify your version of events, Ms. Dempsey, we could put this whole matter to rest.” He moved toward his car.

“Flora, please,” Flora said calmly. She was Flora-Girl, an innocent, the perfect thief. “And that really is a good idea. But I’m afraid I don’t know how to reach her. As I said, she wasn’t available to meet me and—”

“She’s on faculty, isn’t she? It is a faculty house, after all. I’ll just call down to the station, find the number of her office, and we’ll see if she’s there. Put this whole episode to rest so both of you can get on with your day.”

There was nothing to be said to that. He got into the cruiser and sat with one leg hanging sloppily out the door, conjuring the obscenity of an unzipped fly. This wouldn’t end well. The information was easily attained. In moments, Flora could hear that the officer had Cynthia on the phone.

“This is Doug Daniels, Darwin Campus Security here,” he was saying. “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but I’ve got a Flora Dempsey here, at your residence 340 Chestnut Lane.”

Would Cynthia have her arrested? Did a Darwin Campus Security officer even have the authority to arrest anyone? The editorialists of the Gazette would be in fits. She could see the headline in the Witness: dempsey daughter reaches new low.

“According to Ms. Dempsey, you two had an appointment you were unable to keep this afternoon,” Officer Daniels went on. “This circumstance resulted in you giving her permission to enter the premises at 340 Chestnut to retrieve an item. It appears to be a stack of papers.”

A silence. Flora stopped breathing. Mrs. Bianchi’s glare orbited from Cynthia’s house to the cruiser to Flora’s face as she strained to hear.

“Uh-huh,” Daniels said. “That’s right. Very good. Okay, then. Thanks very much.”

He approached them slowly, the highlight of his fucking day. Guess what happened to me today, boys, he’d tell his fellow Division Three cops, Darwin’s Finest. Caught the ex-prez’s daughter in some petty larceny. But then he held out his arms in a gesture of understanding and said, “Ms. Reynolds confirms the story. No cause for alarm. We can all be on our way. Though she’s lucky to have such a vigilant neighbor, Mrs. Bianchi. We in law enforcement rely a great deal on responsible citizens like yourself.”

Was it a trick, a trap? Why was Cynthia being nice? Her way of apologizing for the bad press? Was she claiming the moral high ground, counting on the malleability of a guilty conscience? Or simply planning to use this information to blackmail Flora, to let her know in some noirish way, The poems see print or I send you to lockup?

Mrs. Bianchi and the officer were staring at Flora, waiting for her to leave. She could not return the poems to the house. She was stuck holding the evidence against her.

“Okay, thanks a lot,” Flora said, and waved good-bye. “Sorry for the misunderstanding.” She walked toward her bike. The officer nodded and got back in his car. Mrs. Bianchi edged away, eyeing Flora over her shoulder.

Flora rode away again, free and clear. But there was no surge of relief. After the excitement of the break-in, the malevolent wind act of a bored God, the near arrest, and the benevolent pardoning, she felt very tired. She tried to concentrate on the insect noise the wheels made in spinning, but she could barely push the pedals, or keep a firm grip on the handlebars. She couldn’t make the short ride home. She could make it just to town. There was a pay phone by the common; she could call someone to pick her up. But the pay phone cost fifty cents—when had that happened? She had no change and no one to call. She could see the windows of Paul’s office, and Dr. Berry’s below, but she had no great wish to render herself pathetic to either one of them, no urge to return to that building ever again. She would never return to that building; it was decided. She’d cross a small part of Darwin off the list. Excise something. One fewer place to return to. Enough returning to the scene of the crime. Though it might be a nice gesture to present to Dr. Berry as a parting gift the fact that she’d been sleeping in her father’s bed—an irresistible Freudian morsel as an adieu.

She propped the Peugeot against the pay phone and sat on the adjacent bench. She pulled the poem she had intended to keep from her back pocket. With it came two business cards: one rather chaste, with the name Bill Curtis, and the title Editor, which Cynthia had foisted on her over breakfast at the Spotted Salamander; the other bescriptured—And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. John 1:5—and decreeing Esther Moon, Executive Director and Founder, Intelligent Darwin. Good Lord. How long had it been since she’d washed those jeans? She put the cards back in the pocket and unfolded the poem.

The poem tells of dinners at Ponzu, of watching the two side by side, his daughter “in her day-old braids,” and her friend, the Wizard, “neater, stricter.” “The first love affair,” he writes, “like most won’t end well.” “She is mine and not my own,” the poem goes on, “this other / self I’ve grown, separates from me, cell-like / and utterly. The truth of Oedipus not Freud’s / dirty murder incest romp, but that we / cannot protect our children from their lot.” It ends with a conversation between Georgia and Lewis, Georgia young and battered, and Lewis young and battered, too, though in a different way. She claims she is no wizard—how else to explain the fall? No, he counters, it’s further proof of wizardry—who else survives such Icarus heights? None of us is unscathed, he says. I was before, she tells him. He tells her, Blame me, if you blame anyone at all; I’m at fault, if someone is. She won’t reply but curls her wounded wing around herself and disappears.

“Flora.” It was Paul Davies, walking toward her. But he hadn’t said it in the nice way, not like the boy you had a crush on acknowledging your presence; he’d been called to the headmaster’s office; he’d been caught by the cops. Though it was he who had caught her unprepared.

“Hi, Paul.” She tucked the poem away. Was he stalking her?

“Do you have a minute? Do you want to get a cup of coffee?” he asked.

They hadn’t spoken since their argument, though as they’d never spoken every day, it was possible to imagine that it was not that they had completely given up on each other, but had simply fallen into a patch of busyness and preoccupation.

He noticed her bike. “So you got that back,” he said.

“I’m not in the mood for coffee,” Flora said.

“Mind if I sit, then?”

He sat but didn’t speak. He looked nervous, and handsome. He played with his hands as if they were some fresh, weird discovery.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“I think I may owe you an apology, Flora.”

“For that fight? I don’t think so. We both said stupid things. I certainly wish I’d drunk less and said less that night.”

“Not for the fight per se.”

“Per se?”

“After the fight.”

“Not calling? I didn’t call, either, Paul. We both behaved childishly. But there’s no need to rehash all that. Really.”

“I think I may be responsible for the story in the Witness, and I guess, by extension, that nonsense in the Gazette today.”

“You think?” She stared at him, but he would not look at her.

“I told someone about your dad’s work, and he told someone else, and then that was it. I saw it in the paper.”

Flora lowered her head. She would not throw up in front of him, Paul Davies, Esq., though the revelation was nauseating, her stomach empty and metallic. The worst of it was Cynthia’s kindness, Cynthia’s generosity, Cynthia saying to Officer Daniels of the elite Darwin squad, Yes, of course she had permission to enter my house. Yes, those papers were hers to take.

“Please, say something, Flora.”

“Why would you do that? You knew I wasn’t ready for anyone to know.”

“I was so furious, after that fight, I wasn’t myself. You seemed so spoiled, so entitled. And your sense of superiority—as if you were trying to control the way I thought. I felt you didn’t deserve your father’s poetry, that you had no right to be the person in control.”

“For an apology, this is shaping up just great,” she said.

He had talked to his friend Jim, the Apostle who edited the online journal, and Jim had told a colleague, and eventually the Darwin College intern who worked for Jim, and whose job it was to troll the Web site for the most scurrilous postings and delete them, heard, and told his friend at the Witness. “At least I think that’s what happened,” Paul said.

“And the anonymous source—that quote?” Flora asked.

“It was an approximation of what I’d said to Jim, passed down second-or thirdhand. Not the world’s most responsible journalism.”

“Or lawyerism, or boyfriendism,” Flora said. “Jesus, Paul.”

Paul looked at her in his old curious way. “We all do things we’re not particularly proud of, because in the short term they make us feel the smallest bit better. Don’t we?”

Flora stood up and moved to her bike, her escape vehicle. As someone who hated to apologize, she accepted that. “So much for attorney-client privilege,” she said.

“You going to have me disbarred?”

“It’s tempting.”

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked. “To make amends?”

She was sure she could think of something.

For Thanksgiving that year, Flora and her mother flew south to see her grandparents and soak up a bit of warmth while her father did God knows what in the President’s House. They lived in a coral-colored world, as old people often did, faded colors for fading lives, in a narrow two-story condo near the beach. Flora’s mother had been closest to her father, but now he was losing himself, every day one further idea or story or proper noun missing or gone. He read excerpts from newspaper articles again and again—always the same sentences from the same stories, his memory failing but his mind remarkably consistent. Each morning, Flora’s grandmother helped him to bathe, and to shave, and to dress. After breakfast, she’d say, “I’ve got to go put my face on”—a creepy expression—before disappearing into the bathroom for what felt like hours. Now it was as if she had to put his face on, too.

It was funny how different Flora’s mother and grandmother were, one’s parents’ parents both mystifying and clarifying. Flora had never known her father’s parents—they had died when she was young—and so had never seen what it was for him to be the child. But it was as if Joan Dempsey had formed her womanhood to be her mother’s opposite. Unlike her mother, she never wore any makeup except lipstick, staining her already dark lips a deeper red-wine stain. Flora’s grandmother wore perfume—she smelled like velvet—and had her nails done, and dressed in colors like lavender and mauve. Her mother found scents suffocating and smelled like Marlboros—a smell Flora also liked—and wore, as much as possible, only black. Their politics were similar—they liked to say they came from anarchist stock—and they both loved old songs by Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim. But that was about it.

Flora and her mother shared the guest room upstairs, Flora sleeping on the trundle bed that pulled out from under her mother’s twin bed. Joan was annoyed because her mother hadn’t made the beds, and had made them dash out for groceries as soon as they arrived.

“What a warm welcome,” she complained when they were lying side by side in their two small beds. “It’s like she wants us to feel like an inconvenience.”

“You should be nicer to Nana,” Flora said. “She’s having a hard time.”

“I’m having a hard time, too,” her mother said, turning teary. “She should be nicer to me.”

And Flora saw how both things were true, and maybe impossible. She loved her grandmother, who was stylish in an old-lady way and had once been a great beauty, and wore perfume and makeup and let Flora prowl through her jewelry box and try on rings and necklaces and brooches and showed her other ways to be a woman. She didn’t let Joan smoke in the house, and so her mother sat outside on the steps like a sullen teenager in her pajamas, ashing beside the potted tomato plants Flora’s grandmother watered in the mornings.

On Thanksgiving Day, they were going to some friends of her grandmother, and Flora’s mother baked an apple pie—the first time she’d done that since before they moved to Darwin. Then she dropped it on the sidewalk on the way to the car and she cried and the day seemed doomed. But her grandmother’s friends were two men named Fred and Jon and their house had a pool and Flora and her mother went swimming and had handstand competitions, which her grandmother judged, and on the way home Flora was happily full, her fingertips wrinkled like little brains, and she fell asleep against her mother’s shoulder.

When they got back to Darwin and their little house on Sunday afternoon, the key turned, but they couldn’t get inside. It was as if the door had been nailed shut, and upon further inspection they saw that it had. An envelope rested against the sealed door with her mother’s name written across in her father’s cryptic handwriting.

“Maybe you should open that,” Flora said. “Maybe it explains something.”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to deal with his shit right now.”

So they went around to the side of the house and let themselves in the other door and saw that the house had been robbed, everything that could be unplugged gone—coffeemaker, toaster, hair dryer, stereo, television. Also Flora’s horse fund—a mason jar stuffed with the part of her allowance she’d been saving since they moved so that one day she could buy a horse of her own to never ride. The letter from her father explained there had been a rash of break-ins along the street where they lived and that the postman had discovered their door hanging wide open and reported it to the police and that Darwin Buildings and Grounds would be over on Monday to repair it.

But the letter also said that the television the burglars had stolen had been his—she had taken it from the bedroom of the President’s House and not from the third floor and it should never have been in her house in the first place, she was really only supposed to take the things on the third floor, so if she could just send him a check for two hundred dollars, they’d call it even. Her mother tore up the letter and threw the pieces on the ground and, for the third time in four days, grew tearful, lonely, and rageful.

The worst of it was, Flora had been starting to like him again. It was as though her father wanted her to hate him, or at least didn’t care one way or the other if she did. So she obliged. She coated herself in anger, hard as a wrinkled walnut shell.