party. She’d been carrying them around ever since. While a group of neighborhood brats had batted at a Raggedy Ann piñata, Hud had sauntered in holding a beer bottle at his side, with a girl’s rabbit-fur coat he’d ordered from a catalog. Nina had worn the coat outside all day, stumbling, nearly fainting from the heat, her fair hair dark with sweat. “Mother’s little helper,” the Widow had whispered, administering the pills to Tuesday in a handshake, the wooden cherries of her bracelet rattling.
Tuesday wanted to swallow the pills now, but she remembered how a psychiatrist had put Gatling on prescriptions once, mood drugs that made him dopey and sluggish and trembled his hands. But for a while it had been a relief having Gatling so docile and curled up on her sofa watching afternoon reruns of The Rockford Files and McMillan and Wife.
Lily accepted the quarter as payment for the ring, and Tuesday walked on to Hud’s building. The buzzer, she knew, didn’t buzz, so she picked up some crumbled pieces of brick on the sidewalk and tossed them up to tap against the upstairs windows. Where is my family? she thought, noticing her reflection in the window of the defunct shoe repair shop. She pulled the one remaining false eyelash from her lid, then ran her long press-on nails through her hair, combing out her beehive. When you’re all alone in the world, you only have yourself to worry about, she thought. But when you have people, their tragedies are your tragedies. Your potential for misery is doubled, tripled, quadrupled.
Then she looked past her reflection to the shoes that remained on a shelf. The shop owners had just up and closed one day, after committing their thirty-year-old autistic son to an institution. They retired to Oregon, leaving behind some repaired shoes still uncollected, others still unrepaired. Tuesday saw one of her own strappy sandals that she’d forgotten she owned. The thin black ankle strap that had broken loose was now perfectly reattached, and the shoe sat waiting to step off into an elegant evening, high-heeled and pristine, its toe scuffs polished away. It wasn’t the type of shoe she’d wear, so she hadn’t even missed it, didn’t even know where its match was. She’d bought the shoes a few years before, when she and Hud were trying to save their marriage. Every other weekend or so, they would dress up and drive to the casinos across the river from Omaha. While Hud played blackjack after dinner with loosened necktie, Tuesday, in her black cocktail dress, would sit alone at a table in the lounge sipping chocolate martinis and listening to a woman who impersonated Barbara Streisand, Tina Turner, and Karen Carpenter. Those evenings, Tuesday thought, weren’t as bad as they sounded. They were nice, actually.
Tuesday rubbed at the glass of her mood ring as she headed back home, hoping to work its mud-colored froth into a shade of pink. As she turned the corner onto her street, she slowed her steps, giving Hud a better chance to sneak Nina back into her bed. Ghosts knotted together from pillow cases hung from porch eaves. A scarecrow, its stuffing beaten out of it, lay in a heap in the middle of the street.
In her driveway now were her father’s Caddy and her sister’s VW bug. When she saw Mrs. Katt, the neighbor, walk up to the porch, she began to panic. Mrs. Katt would show up at any moment of despair with a can of Folgers, and she’d scrub your kitchen while you convalesced with your family in another room. You’d sit in your pajamas, you’d play rummy, waiting for some news or some fever to break, and become somewhat eased by the heavy scent of cinnamon as Mrs. Katt heated an offering in the stove. Tuesday had a cupboard full of Mrs. Katt’s plates and tureens she needed to return, all with the woman’s name on a piece of masking tape on the bottom.
Tuesday quit worrying when she heard the loud discord of the out-of-tune piano as somebody tumbled their fingers across the keys. Hud was the only one who ever played the piano, which had been shoved onto the screened-in back porch, and she began to hear his voice rising above the whir of the broken air conditioner. She didn’t want to be, but she was glad to hear him singing in her house. She thought of one beautiful song Hud had played for her on the piano on a wet October night. As the rain tip-tipped against the screens, she rocked a sleeping Nina in the old chair they’d had since their first apartment. The joints of the rocking chair squeaked and quivered, and Hud sang softly a song he made up on the spot, about what it felt like to dream at night about a girl like Tuesday.
Pressing her forehead against the screen of the porch door, Tuesday watched Hud entertain her father and the Widow and her older sister, Rose, named for the shock of her father’s red hair she’d been born with, and Mrs. Katt. They all stood or sat sipping coffee from Tuesday’s best cups, swaying to Hud’s song, which seemed to be about a brokenhearted father putting his children to bed. Rose and Red sat in the nearly wrecked wicker chairs, small plates of Mrs. Katt’s crumb cake balanced on their knees. Everyone’s eyes were on Nina, who did an interpretive dance in the middle of the small room, just behind the piano bench. Nina linked her fingers above her head, closed her eyes, and turned on the ball of one foot in an approximation of a pirouette. She then quickly and awkwardly moved into a jazz singer’s slo-mo hip shimmy and snaked her arms around in front of herself. Nina’s dancing was silly and pretty all at once, and Tuesday closed her eyes, mesmerized by her daughter.
Then Nina screamed, startled out of her hypnotic dance by the sight of Tuesday’s dark shadow at the screen. Nina stood there, both hands tight at her mouth. Hud stopped playing, and everyone looked, alarmed, toward the door.
“Mommy!” Nina said when she realized it was only Tuesday. She ran to the screen and opened it, then hugged Tuesday’s legs. “Oh, you won’t believe what happened,” Nina said, speaking in a rush. “It’s not Daddy’s fault, really it’s not,” she said. “Really it’s not. The car. It’s the car’s fault. The car just up and took a shit on him.”
Tuesday finger-thumped the top of Nina’s head. “You know I don’t want you talking like that,” she said. She looked around the room as everyone avoided her eyes. They looked into their coffee cups, or out the windows of the porch, suddenly embarrassed for having enjoyed Hud’s company. Hud just sat hunched at the piano, pushing down slowly on this key, then that, making no music. Rose pinched at a run in the ankle of her stocking. Stockings, thought Tuesday. Now, how about that. Practically crack-of-dawn Saturday morning and there she sits in pricey shoes and her best light-yellow summer dress. Rose always did have a thing for Hud. Tuesday could smell the stench of Rose’s perfume, some designer knockoff she ordered by the vat on the Internet.
“Honeycomb,” Tuesday said to Nina, bending over to kiss the top of her head, “would you go to your room and wait for Mommy? I’ll be in in a minute to tell you how much you worried me.”
“OK,” Nina said, walking away with her head lowered.
“So how’d everyone hear about Hud’s little party this morning?” Tuesday said. “His little party here in my house?”
“We were up at the flea market,” the Widow said. “People said your hair was a mess and you were looking for Nina.”
“Don’t make a federal case, Day,” Rose said, sharing a smirk with Hud and crossing her legs. “Everything’s fine.”
“You stink,” Tuesday said, feeling mean toward everyone there. “Where the hell did you get that cologne? Truck stop?”
“Oh, girls,” Red said. “Let’s be sweet.”
Rose laughed through her nose, rolled her eyes. “Shows you how much you know,” she said. “It’s Shoot the Moon you’re smelling.”
“Oh, is that what that is?” the Widow said, clearly impressed. “I thought maybe that’s what.”
“Got it at Marshall Field’s that last time in Chicago,” Rose told the Widow, uncrossing her legs, then recrossing them. “I’ll get you some the next time I go back.”
“Oh,
