The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski Page A

and worked in Bayou Cymbaline and had only gone into the Last Stop Diner for a cup of coffee and some poppy-seed cake.
    Adelaide knew a hardworking man when she saw one, and once she confirmed Theodore Roman had a good-paying job at a cannery, she flirted enough to make him want to come back. It worked. By his second visit she was making sure he knew that she’d cut him an extra large slice of poppy-seed cake, and she made a little show of running her finger along the cake knife and licking the frosting off slowly. By his third visit she was batting her eyes and bending over to pick up things she’d accidentally-on-purpose dropped, because she’d been told one time that she had a nice backside.
    After two months of coming all the way from Bayou Cymbaline for a cup of so-so coffee, and without having received so much as a kiss, Theodore Roman produced a diamond ring from his left shirt pocket, and Adelaide Cormier judged it good enough for now. Theo was a nice man; he really did deserve better. But all things happen for a reason.
    The wedding was a low-key ceremony that took place at the Cornerstone Southern Baptist Church in Bayou Cymbaline, which was two blocks west of the VFW Hall, where a small reception was held. The day’s events were attended by Theo’s coworkers and all of the Shoats Creek Romans who could make it. It seems the Cormiers’ invitations went out late. Theo wouldn’t meet his in-laws until a few years later, when he took Dancy out for a visit. But Adelaide never went back.
    The low-budget wedding was intentional on Adelaide’s part. The big money was reserved for the honeymoon and her trousseau. Theo scratched his head and questioned the need for six pairs of new shoes, to which Adelaide responded that if he couldn’t afford for his wife to have shoes maybe he should have said something before she gave up everything to marry him and move to a place where she didn’t know a single soul. Theo never questioned her spending habits again. He learned that if he just let her buy what she wanted for herself or the house, she could be pleasant enough. By the same token, Adelaide had figured out that it was best to have marital relations before she spent more than ten dollars on anything, which is how it was that Dancy came to be conceived the night before the purchase of a dining room set complete with a sideboard, a hutch, and two leaves for the table.
    Adelaide didn’t dislike pregnancy; she despised it. It wasn’t that she was sick in the mornings, or at any other time for that matter; it was how heavy and painful her breasts became, and how stretch marks ran all over her abdomen like silvery mucous trails left by snails, and especially how her belly button stuck out. Adelaide seethed through the whole nine months and vowed she would never be pregnant again.
    She’d labored for less than two hours when Dancy glided out of her body as if she were covered in Vaseline. Adelaide could have filed her nails through the whole thing with very little disruption. The doctor said that in all his years of practice he’d never seen a woman have such an easy time of it.
    Theo came to her hospital room afterwards, a dozen red roses in one hand and a jeweler’s box in the other. Adelaide said that the roses were pretty, but for future reference she preferred pink or yellow, and that she would exchange the opal necklace as soon as she was able. He had the receipt, didn’t he? Then she told him there would be no more sex in their future because the doctor said she’d almost died while giving birth and would most likely be in pain the rest of her life.
    As for forming a bond with her daughter, well, that would have to come about all by itself and would definitely not happen through nursing. Nursing was for broodmares and barn cats, she said, and that’s why God made bottles.
    Theo was another story. Dancy took over his heart from day one. It was Theo who stayed up nights when she was sick with a stomachache, a