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The children’s puppy was run over at the end of May. Not on the main road, which Pam might have expected, but on the dirt track that formed the western boundary of the farm. How was it possible? No one even drove there. But there he was, splayed out in the lush green weeds of the shoulder, his sweet muzzle soaked with blood. Pam wrapped him in her coat and carried him across the field to the house, his body still soft in her arms.
With the kittens, the vet thought it was some sort of congenital defect. The goldfish were from overfeeding — no surprise there, given the twins’ fascination with the food shaker. And the duckling? Who knew? Pam didn’t need to settle on a definite culprit, but the children did. The children needed an explanation for everything.
“What animal ate Duckle?” James asked again. This time he wasn’t looking at her; he was pounding his hot dog headfirst in a puddle of ketchup.
Pam turned back to the sink, unconsciously shutting out the sight of his smooth, too-serious face. He was seven years old and his father was dead. The list of things she couldn’t protect him from had suddenly become infinite.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” she said lightly. “Maybe a fox?”
“Or a raccoon?”
“Or a raccoon.”
“Which?”
She could not escape. The chicks died, the barn cat came down with distemper, the goats wandered out onto the rotten ice of the pond and drowned. By the time Tommy’s hamster disappeared she was beyond caring; she was in a whirl of fury, like a horse maddened by flies. Besides, she had always hated the hamster.
“How could you hate a hamster?” asked Trish, her best friend.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Pam held the phone with her shoulder as she scooped the warm clothes out of the dryer. She saw again the little curved teeth, the pointed face. “It was just greedy, you know? Greedy and self-serving.”
“It was a hamster! What’d you expect: Gandhi?”
“No, really, I’m telling you, all that thing cared about was eating. It would have eaten its own ass if it could have got its mouth around it.”
Trish laughed and Pam felt the heaviness inside her ease up a little. To laugh, to make a joke, however feeble, restored to her a sense of herself as someone normal — a mother, a woman in the world. She stuffed another load into the machine and let the lid slam shut.
“What’s that noise? You’re not doing more laundry, are you?” Trish said. “It’s late. Go to bed.”
Pam sighed. “I wish. I’ve still got the barn to do.”
“OK, pioneer woman.”
It was their old, half-serious dispute. Why take on so much? Why make life so complicated? Trish kept things simple: one child, one cat, a backyard just big enough for a swing set and a patio.
“Don’t worry,” Pam said. “At the rate we’re going, every living thing on this place will be wiped out by July and I’ll just sit around eating bonbons.”
There was a heavy pause. “Joke,” Pam said, but it was too late: the fact of her situation had loomed up between them.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m OK,” Pam said. She pictured Trish putting the phone down when they were finished and padding down the hall to find Derek, her husband. A bitter envy rose in her.
“You call,” Trish said. “One A.M., whatever.”
“I know,” Pam said gently. “Thanks.” After they had hung up, she lay down on the kitchen floor to wait. The grief came in a surge: savage, shocking. She cried hard for a few minutes; then she wiped her eyes, got up, and went back to folding clothes.
Brian had died six months earlier of a massive coronary. There was nothing Pam could have done even if she had been there, and she hadn’t; she had been inside cooking dinner. When he didn’t come in on time, she had stomped out to the barn, fired up with her habitual annoyance (he dallied over everything), and found him lying face down in the frozen mud of the paddock. He had been thawing the horses’ water. They weren’t even his concern, the horses. He was a lawyer, not a farmer; he didn’t even like to ride. Yet he would do such a thing — to help her out, to mark his pleasure in the crazy, animal-filled circus that was his home life. He had loved all of that: the chickens sneaking into the sunroom; the mice making nests in the horse blankets; the rich, crowing absurdity of having three children and six horses and four dogs and two cats and God only knew how many chickens and goats and ducks. He would come home from work and stretch out on the couch, sated, an only child surrounded by fecundity.
It was up to Pam to say no, to set limits, to buy life insurance and save for the kids’ college. She was vigilant, always. Her father had died young, and she knew how quickly things could go bad. But Brian had believed, if not in God, then in his own good fortune: Pam was the best; the kids were the best; everything would be fine.
But he had been wrong, hadn’t he?
