“No,” Rosemarie said, but she paused a moment first, todecide.
“Let’s go inside,” Jane said.
“Can Russula come?”
“You know the cats don’t come in the house,” Jane said, butalready she knew she could not refuse Rosemarie anything then. Rosy-cheekedfrom the warmth of the barn, her breath sweet from eating pancakes instead ofnourishing as her brother and sister did in the mornings, she was impossiblygood; she was perfect. Nothing as wonderful as her could remain.
Jane made a fire in the hearth, though the morning was warm,and then tore open the letter and read the entire thing twice, holding thepaper at a distance. Rosemarie was six years old, nearly seven, the lettersaid, as if her own mother wouldn’t know that. Federal regulations requirethat children aged seven to seventeen be enrolled. Jane had dreaded thisletter when it came for Ainsley and again when it came for Devon, but she hadknown already that she would send the older children to school. She had notbeen tempted by the empty checkbox at the bottom of the page, with its promiseof reprieve from the devouring school bus doors: I will be homeschooling mychild. Now she covered the checkbox with her fingers. She made herself lookat Rosemarie, who was sitting cross-legged on the rug with a pencil and a sheetof lined paper. Russula lay nearby, resplendent across the back of an armchair,batting halfheartedly at a sunspot. Rosemarie was drawing a picture of her,Jane saw. Already she’d copied down the cat’s name from her field guide toedible mushrooms, writing in broad crooked letters that looked like runes orcarvings.
Jane folded the letter and tucked it back inside theenvelope and told herself: you have a month, and only a month, and then youwill tell her. And she did not throw the letter into the fire, even though shewanted to. But she tucked it inside a drawer, which was almost the same, andshe let Russula stay indoors for good even though Devon and Ainsley protested.She wasn’t catching mice anymore, Ainsley pointed out. She slept on Rosemarie’sbed, Devon reported. She had fleas. She was dirty. They wanted tohurt Rosemarie with those words. Sometimes they succeeded. Jane did notintervene, but she also did not send the cat back to the barn.
If Rosemarie’s father were alive, a barn cat couldn’t havecome near the house, much less into a bedroom. But the painted letters spellingPALEY on the mailbox were fading into illegible scratches, and thehomework that Ainsley and Devon carted back from school promised them thingsthat no Paley child used to desire. Walter Paley had died four years back, anepoch in the lifetime of a child. With no other Paleys around, sometimes Janecould make herself forget that the Paley rules were rules for a reason, thatthey were supposed to protect the people who followed them.
◊
Ainsley condemned Rosemarie’s cat to death at the dinnertable, kneeling on her chair with her homework spread out across her placesetting. She gnawed on the end of her pencil, wrote the answer to a mathproblem, then set aside her work and proclaimed, “That one-eyed cat has tumorsin its belly.”
Jane paused with her fork halfway to her mouth and looked atRosemarie, who was picking at a baked potato.
“She doesn’t know what tumors is,” Devon said. “She’s ababy.”
Rosemarie forgot the potato and glared across the table athim. “I do know.”
“Her belly will blow up,” Ainsley said triumphantly. “Like aballoon.”
“That’s enough,” Jane said, knowing they wouldn’t listen.Feeling, as she often did, a sort of low-grade horror in the face of herchildren. “The cat will be fine.”
“No,” Devon said. “It’s really dying.”
“I know it is,” Rosemarie said, a lump audible in herthroat. “I already know.”
“Sorry, Rosemarie.” Devon would always backpedal when thepoint of tears had been reached. “It’s an old cat anyway, you know.”
“You could get a different cat,” Ainsley agreed. “Like akitten. That won’t die soon.”
“But they’re not Russula,” Rosemarie said.
“You love her,” Jane said. “There’s nothing wrong with that.If you’d like, we’ll have a funeral where you can say goodbye.”
“Like at a church?” Ainsley said, scrunching up her face.None of the children had been to a funeral; their father, like his ancestors,had been buried on the property. “We’re taking the dead cat to a church?”
“They won’t let us. They’ll make us get out,” Devon said.
“A wake then. At our house,” Jane managed, before thechildren could go any further. Already, Rosemarie was sniffling, her eyesred-rimmed. “She’ll stay inside with us, Rosie. We’ll take good care of her.Until—”
To Jane’s relief, neither Devon nor Ainsley finished thesentence. But later, as Jane extinguished the candle at Ainsley’s bedside, outof the dark came the words: “Do you think something else will die, the day thatRussula does?”
“You don’t have to worry about it,” Jane said, because shedidn’t know.
Ainsley reached for her hand and grabbed hard, herfingernails pressing Jane’s palm. “I know the cat will be dead, it won’tmatter,” she said, “but I don’t want Rosemarie to see us nourish on Russula.”
“Don’t use the cat’s name,” Jane said, harsher than shemeant to, and winced as she felt Ainsley’s fingers slip out of hers. “If itcomes to that, you’ll just miss a day of school. I’m sure your friends have stayedhome sick for much sillier reasons than that.”
Ainsley said nothing for a moment, then, “A wake for a catis silly.”
Only a Paley child would have said that, Jane thought. Shehad numerous memories of childhood pet burials: Labradors and tabbies committedto the earth with bunches of wildflowers and off-key hymns and a firstshovelful of dirt flatly smacking the surface of a cardboard coffin, almostlike how they’d buried Walter except that the Paley children hadn’t cried asmuch as Jane used to.
Jane stood to go, feeling at an impasse; how could sheexplain grief to a child who seemed constitutionally incapable of it? ThenAinsley sat upright in bed. “Rosemarie made us send a letter for her today,”she burst out, with that tattling lilt which Jane hated. Jane could see thesatisfaction on her daughter’s face, a sort of hungry frantic pleasure. “She madeus. Devon found the address, and I said we shouldn’t, but Rosemarie didn’tcare.”
“That’s enough,” Jane said,
