Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman Page B

was still squatting to peer at the flower. Getting up wasn’t as easy as it had once been. Chris held out his hand.
    In the evening Danny sometimes dropped in. His bees were swarming, he told her. The queen mates with a few lucky drones—they are her sons, if you want to be accurate, sometimes her grandsons. Nature is no respecter of seemliness.
    Happiness lengthens time. Every day seemed as long as a novel. Every night a double feature. Every week a lifetime, a muted lifetime, a lifetime in which sadness, always wedged under her breast like a doorstop, lost some of its bite. When she went back to New York she would feel that a different person had occupied her body for a while, and a different wardrobe had taken over her closet—now she wore only tees and jeans. The stone had found a proper home in her back pocket. The V-necked blouse had been shoved into Fido. Her hair was of course longer, its seemingly random stripes of chestnut—how clever her hairdresser was, how natural they’d looked—now surrendering to honest blond-gray. Brown, pale yellow, gray—she was coiffured in wood bark, wood pulp, and dust. Her glasses were permanently bent because Danny had sat on them. She could probably be mistaken for a displaced bag lady. Or a beaver, who lived among trees and water and other beavers, and feasted on cellulose.
    In November she went back to New York for a few days. Allegra had died.
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” said the well-brought-up Chloe. “Come back right away,” she then commanded. “It’s more fun when you’re home.”
    “Keep the chromite for me,” said Ingrid. “Rub it once in a while.”
    In her ragged state, Ingrid attended the funeral and then went to Allegra’s apartment. Everybody recognized her except for one woman she had never liked, who glared as if she were a hillbilly freeloader. But other friends asked eagerly when she would return to New York. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. She visited a gallery she admired, and also the optician.
    And again the big plane, and the talkative moving walkway, and the small plane, and the bus. She stepped down off the bus into tiny Chloe’s arms; into Lynne’s arms, not much bigger; into Chris’s gentle, huge embrace. From the backseat of the car she saw the house over Lynne’s shoulder. In the late afternoon of the late fall day, the stones looked mauve, a color borrowed from Odilon Redon. Should she mention that? She should not. A rabbit from the woods was chewing on a carrot that Danny must have dropped.
      
    Sometimes the college hosted a quartet or a singer for an afternoon concert. One principal violinist rose up and down on his toes. A poorly modulated soprano projected into the next county. But there was a good second-rate pianist, and Chloe and Lynne listened attentively, and Ingrid, leaning forward, listened hungrily until the last almost-good arpeggio. She felt Chris’s eyes on her. Afterward they went to their favorite restaurant. The waitresses were in their fifties and wore aqua dresses under white aprons. The lamps in the booths were pleated. There was always meat loaf on the menu, and crab, and a vegetarian special. The corn bread was the best she’d ever tasted. They ate from one another’s plates like any family—two big people and two little ones.
    When they ate at home, Chris served from the head of the table, handing Ingrid the first plate, his thumb flipping a stray string bean back among the others. After dinner, when Ingrid read to Chloe, she read fairy tales—they both had a taste for make-believe, especially if royalty was involved.
    “You’re our queen,” Chloe said one night.
    “Queen Giraffe?”
    “Yes! Daddy is the Lion King and Mommy’s one of those little princesses that gets stolen or put to sleep for a while.”
    Lynne was doing laundry and missed the exchange. “And what are you?” Ingrid asked.
    “The nightingale the king can’t live without.”
    Stones figured in many tales, inert