But she was off on her own somewhere. From time to time she would gaze over to where the kids were asleep on the blue bedspread. And who could blame her, realty:” It was a sweet sight. With the cottonwood shade rippling over them they looked like a drawing from one of those old-fashioned children’s books that show babies in underwater scenes, blowing glassy bubbles and holding on to fishes’ tails. Dwayne Ray had on a huge white sailor hat and had nodded forward in his car seat, but Turtle’s mouth was open to the sky. Her hair was damp and plastered down in dark cords on her temples, showing more of her forehead than usual. Even from a distance I could see her eyes dancing around under eyelids as thin as white grape skins. Turtle always had desperate, active dreams. In sleep, it seemed, she was free to do all the things that during her waking life she could only watch.
We went back at that time of evening when it’s dusky but the headlights don’t really help yet. Mattie said she was stone-blind this time of night, so Estevan drove. “Be careful now,” she warned him as the three of them climbed into the cab. “The last thing we need is to get stopped.” Lou Ann and the kids and I followed in my car.
Fortunately the parking lot had a good slant to it so getting started was a piece of cake. I hardly had time to curse, and we caught right up. Mattie needn’t have worried; Estevan was a careful driver. As we puttered along Lou Ann had to keep reaching into the back seat, which wasn’t really a seat but a kind of pit where one used to be, to get the kids settled down. They had both slept through the entire hike back, but now were wide awake.
“Oh, shoot, I’ve sunburned the top half of my boobs,” she said, frowning down her chest. “Stretch marks and all.”
Matties pickup stopped so fast I nearly rear-ended it. I slammed on the brakes and we all pitched forward. There was a thud in the back seat, and then a sound, halfway between a cough and a squeak.
“Jesus, that was Turtle,” I said. “Lou Ann, that was her, wasn’t it? She made that sound. Is her neck broken?”
“She’s fine, Taylor. Everybody’s fine. Look.” She picked up Turtle and showed me that she was okay. “She did a somersault. I think that sound was a laugh.”
It must have been true. She was hanging on to Lou Ann’s boob tube for dear life, and smiling. We both stared at her. Then we stared at the tailgate of the truck in front of us, stopped dead in the road.
“What in the tarnation?” Lou Ann asked.
I said I didn’t know. Then I said, “Look.” In the road up ahead there was a quail, the type that has one big feather spronging out the front of its head like a forties-model ladies’ hat. We could just make out that she was dithering back and forth in the road, and then we gradually could see that there were a couple dozen babies running around her every which way. They looked like fuzzy ball bearings rolling around in a box.
Our mouths opened and shut and we froze where we sat. I suppose we could have honked and waved and it wouldn’t have raised any more pandemonium than this poor mother already had to deal with, but instead we held perfectly still. Even Turtle. After a long minute or two the quail got her family herded off the road into some scraggly bushes. The truck’s brakelights flickered, like a wink, and Estevan drove on. Something about the whole scene was trying to make tears come up in my eyes. I decided I must be about to get my period.
‘You know,” Lou Ann said a while later, “if that had been Angel, he would’ve given himself two points for every one he could hit.”
***Knowing that Turtle’s first uttered sound was a laugh brought me no end of relief. If I had dragged her halfway across the nation only to neglect and entirely botch her upbringing, would she have laughed? I thought surely not. Surely she would have bided her time while she saved up whole words, even sentences. Things like “What do you think you’re doing?”
I suppose some of Lou Ann had rubbed off on me, for me to take this laugh as a sign. Lou Ann was the one who read her horoscope every day, and mine, and Dwayne Ray’s, and fretted that we would never know Turtle’s true sign (which seemed to me the least of her worries), and was sworn to a strange kind of logic that said a man could leave his wife for missing a meteor shower or buying the wrong brand of cookies. If the mail came late it meant someone, most likely Grandmother Logan, had died.
But neither of us could interpret the significance of Turtle’s first word. It was “bean.”
We were in Matties backyard helping her put in the summer garden, which she said was way overdue considering the weather. Matties motto seemed to be “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet, but make sure there’s something growing everywhere else.”
“Looky here, Turtle,” I said. “We’re planting a garden just like Old MacDonald in your book.” Mattie rolled her eyes. I think her main motive, in insisting that Turtle watch us do this, was to straighten the child out. She was concerned that Turtle would
