I was exhausted by the time Mr. Ben came to spell us off at the stand a little while before lunch, his white skin streaked with sweat and dirt. Keeping Mylie safe and out of trouble underneath that ten-foot-by-ten-foot canopy was a full-time job.
“Let’s go to the playhouse,” I said to Arden as I showed Mr. Ben the tally of our sales from that morning. I couldn’t face Mama or Daddy yet.
I didn’t want to see if Mama was still there, lying on her bed, pretending nothing was wrong.
“Sure.” Arden took Mylie’s other hand.
“Swing!” Mylie shouted, so we swung her up between us over and over again, until my arm felt like it was ready to fall off by the time we got to the playhouse. It was just the two of us and Mylie today, since Eli and Rena were playing inside the house—they had air-conditioning that actually worked—and Miss Amanda had taken the two littlest ones to the grocery store half an hour away.
I dropped Mylie’s hand as soon as we got to the playhouse and flopped down on the ground, leaning up against one of the green plywood walls. “Ugh. I am so tired.” Mylie danced off behind the playhouse, singing a baby-talk song to herself.
Arden sat down next to me, her shoulder rubbing up against mine. A pair of ladybugs buzzed through the air, red wings blurring in the sunshine.
“Me too,” she said, stretching her legs out on the dusty dirt in front of us. “It’s so hot. It makes everything feel twice as hard.”
“Dell!” Mylie ran back to us, giggling, her hands stretched out. Green paint was smeared across them and dripping down her palms. She had green handprints on her dress, and her face, and her hair.
I shot up so fast I banged my elbow on the playhouse wall. “Mylie Alexandra Kelly!” I shouted, and Mylie took off running toward the bay, still laughing like a baby hyena. “Where did you even find that? You get back here!”
“No-no-no!” Mylie yelled, her fat little legs pumping. She was way faster than any sixteen-month-old baby ought to be. She ran right up to the edge of the water, keeping just an inch out of my reach the whole time, and then kept on toddling all the way until she ducked right under the surface.
“You little monster baby!” I hauled her out of the water by her arms. She was crying now, water streaming off her hair and her dress and making the green paint on her hands runny and wet. She wasn’t coughing or choking, though, which I figured was a good sign.
Arden was cleaning up a puddle of paint from behind the playhouse when Mylie and I made it back there, Mylie already squirming in my arms and laughing again, like she’d forgotten all about being scared and sad.
“I don’t even know how she got that paint bottle open,” said Arden, taking the paint and stretching up on her tiptoes to set it on top of the playhouse roof this time, just in case. “I swear, Della, I’d rather have every one of my sisters and my brother all rolled up together than Mylie. Even Eli,” she added. Eli was a pest and spent most of his time trying to spy on us and figure out all our secrets.
“Tell me about it,” I said grumpily, putting Mylie in the playhouse and sitting in the doorway so that she couldn’t get out. Mylie clapped her hands and then started rubbing them on the walls, leaving big smudgy streaks of green.
Arden sat back down next to me, giving me a sideways look. “What’s up with your mama, Della?”
She’d asked me the same thing every day all week, and each time I’d changed the subject. I’d wanted so badly to be able to tell Arden that Mama was healed, fixed forever, that nobody had to worry anymore. Even though Arden had seen Mama at her worst, even though I’d told Arden myself that I thought Mama was getting bad again, there was something about speaking the truth aloud—like if I opened my mouth and said how things really were, I’d be giving up all hope of them getting better.
I think Arden guessed some of that, because every time I’d ignored her question, she’d let me do it. But there was something in her brown eyes now that reminded me of the way the O’Connells’ milk cow looked when she didn’t want to be milked, stubborn and prepared to stay that way as long as she needed to.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Arden added, just like she knew what I was thinking.
“I think it’s getting better,” I said, but my voice wouldn’t come out quite right.
“Liar. I can see it all over your face. What’s going on, Dell?”
I thought about Mama’s pill, stark white on Daddy’s hand that morning, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Arden about that. If I did, there’d be no going back at all, no chance I could convince Arden to keep on holding my secret.
“Okay,” I whispered. “It’s not getting better. But you still can’t tell anyone, Arden! I still—she still might—”
I’d never seen Arden looking so upset. “Don’t you see? You and your daddy have to wake up sometime and realize you can’t do all this on your own! Look, I bet if we talked to my parents about it, they’d—”
“No!” My heart was beating so fast it felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the world. I closed my eyes and thought of numbers. Counting by nines was always especially soothing, with all that symmetry. Nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six, forty-five. “It isn’t just Mama. It’s Daddy, too. I’ve never seen him like this, not in my whole life. Like he’s going to break down right in front of my eyes, the way his tractor did. It’s scary, Arden. What if he decides he just can’t take Mama anymore, and he just . . . leaves? What if you tell somebody, and they take Mama away, and Daddy decides he’s done, too?”
Fifty-four. Sixty-three. Seventy-two.
“I don’t think he would do that.”
“Just promise. Promise me you won’t tell anyone. Just give me a few more days.”
Arden looked like she was one step away from being sick all over the ground in front of us, but finally she nodded. “Just for a few more days,” she said. “But only a few more days.”
That night as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard Mama and Daddy talking in the bedroom next to me. None of the words they were saying came through the wall clear enough to understand, but I could still hear the murmuring, the way their voices went up and down for questions or statements, the way Daddy’s sounded more like a hum and Mama’s more like a whisper.
They weren’t yelling, this time. Just talking, sounding serious and loving just like they had a thousand other nights while I was falling asleep. I wondered if they were talking about what had happened at breakfast. Daddy didn’t sound angry; I wondered if he was working on forgiving Mama for all those pills she’d been only pretending to take for who knows how long.
I sighed and rolled over. It felt like I had been split down the middle, like the yellow-and-blue sun Arden and I had drawn at the farm stand last week. One half of me was relieved that at least Mama and Daddy were talking, at least Daddy sounded calm. Maybe I’d been wrong about that secret fear I’d confessed to Arden this morning at the playhouse.
But the other half of me still simmered with anger, hot and thick as the drought that lay over us all.
I thought of the white powder smeared across Mama’s pocket.
Daddy may have been working on forgiving Mama for all those pills she’d skipped, but I didn’t know if I ever could.
And I wasn’t sure I could forgive him, either, for forgiving her.