White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse Page A

same bed. He said that it was possible to be
happily married and continue like this indefinitely. She didn’t ask him not to see
Erika. It felt as though it was his business, not hers.
    He said gently, “I’m not
stopping you, you know.”
    “Stopping me from what?
Leaving?”
    “No. I love you.”
    She didn’t believe him. “What?
What do you love?”
    He looked into her face, his eyes searching
the contours. “I love the gap between your teeth,” he said. “I love
your hair.” He went to touch it.
    Without thinking, she tilted her head away.
Those weren’t things to love—hair, teeth. She wasn’t even responsible for
them. “Is that it?”
    “No,” he said. “Of course
not.” They fell silent. Once she’d loved his face, the penetrating aqua
eyes, shyness in their depths, the scar under the left one that he’d gotten as a
boy, running pell-mell into the branch of a tree. She’d loved his mouth.
She’d loved his bashful uncommunicativeness, how she’d had to tease words
out of him, the way heneglected his socks until the holes grew so
large, three toes came through. She’d loved his old-fashioned sense of honor, at
least she did when she believed he possessed it. Now, she didn’t know who he
was.
    He began again. “What I mean is
I’m not stopping you from seeing someone yourself—if you wanted to.”
    “I don’t need your
permission,” she said coldly. “It’s already been offered, and I turned
it down.”
    “Who was it?”
    She wouldn’t tell him. What she found
unforgivable was the way his eyes dilated with excitement when she threw out that piece
of information. How dare he? She picked up her pillow and moved into the spare room. She
hunted around for sheets and dragged them out of the closet. When she lay down on the
bed, the sheet felt cool for a moment, and then it turned hot. Out the window was a
remote sliver of light, a wedge of new moon shining in all its blank indifference.
    She heard Lawrence get up, and then the
sound of truck wheels crunching over gravel. She was stunned, humiliated. Until now,
she’d told herself, okay. This is normal, this is modern. But now, sobs erupted
that couldn’t be stopped.
    The dogs were waiting for Daphne. Alice got
out of bed and found her lying on the kitchen floor, exhausted, her head on her paws.
She’d gotten out during the dinner party at Erika and Hasse’s. She looked up
but didn’t raise her head; her eyes looked bleary. The pack outside seemed to be
thinning. Alice asked, “Are you pregnant?” Daphne lifted her chin and put it
down again.
    She pictured the perspiration near
Erika’s hairline, her bone white skin and dark hair. Lawrence touching her. There
was a ferocity in that woman, wolf-mother. Lawrence never had a chance. She was playing
with him for her own reasons, she didn’t really want him, but he didn’t know
that yet. A wave of protectiveness washed over her, metamorphosing to rage.
“Bastard,” she said as she climbed back into the guest-room bed, the word
bouncing off the white wall.

11
    Five days a week Isaac worked at the sunken
garden, hardly stopping to eat. He came early in the morning and worked late. His tools
were a pick and shovel and a wheelbarrow, which he used to bring dirt out from the floor
of the garden to the mounded lip. Every hour, he moved great piles of earth. Alice
worried he’d get sunstroke and told him not to work so hard. She didn’t know
what drove him. All she knew was that he couldn’t go back home, and he had no
future she could see.
    It was a late Friday afternoon. Isaac had
dug down six or eight feet. The hole was already ten feet long and six feet wide.
She’d agreed to go out the following day and buy some small trees with him to
plant on the perimeter of the hole. She was inside with the doors and windows shut
against the hot wind. Suddenly, his voice was at the door facing the garden.
“Something has happened,
mma
. I have broken the water pipe with the
pickax.” Behind