Free Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew Page B

misbehavior—well, cruelty. The smile stayed there; it took over her entire face, but she could not excuse her peculiar pleasure. After all, a little kindness among the civilians was what she had longed for and valued above all else in her life. Nevertheless, her father’s performance had a certain gruesome elegance that she admired. But as she walked on down the street, careful along the sidewalk, which rose and fell precariously over the ancient tree roots, her smile dried on her face as though it were set in clay. Her smile lay over her lips, and her eyebrows remained lifted in amusement, as if her expression had just been extracted from a plasticine mold. It was one of those times when her mind raced ahead with new thoughts and neglected to signal her body of the altered direction. She stepped carefully along, embracing a brown paper bag with each arm, thinking about what her father had said to
her
. What boy did he mean? What child of hers could her father have access to?
    When she passed by her father’s house in order to get to the corner where she would cross, she slowed slightly and turned her head, still with its rigid, powdery smile, to that house being so elaborately turned out. She was suddenly so uneasy that a tingling spread down her back and arms. She was beyond judging this situation; she didn’t even attempt to reach an objective state. She only knew that she did not want her children to encounter that evanescent, chill cynicism her father possessed. She did not want that cloud to envelop David or Toby or Sarah.
    But all she saw of interest as she approached her father’s house with an eye out for something sinister was the large gray cat hunched on his doorstep, and he only stared at her audaciously, assured of his domain. Her father doted on this cat; Dinah saw him in the evenings allowing the cat to climb over him and sit on his newspaper as he was trying to read it. She had watched from her window as her father cut up bits of cheese from the tray of hors d’oeuvres at his elbow and fed the little pieces to the cat. Sometimes the cat would eat a bite, condescendingly, and sometimes he would flick his tail and walk away around the corner of the house. Dinah had come to a standstill at her father’s gate, and all at once she put her groceries down on the sidewalk and stooped so that she could reach her hand through the wrought-iron bars and wriggle her fingers enticingly at the cat. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” But the cat just looked back at her solemnly, unmoving, and Dinah found herself stooping there, feeling the kind of fool that only a cat can make you feel. She picked up the two sacks and went home.
    D inah was a good cook. She often suspected that the pleasure she found in preparing a meal, step by step, with careful calculation and order all around her, was a substitute for the pleasure she would have felt if she could have applied such sensible organization to the other aspects of her life. It wasn’t everyday cooking she enjoyed, and in fact, that had fallen by the wayside, a victim of her summer listlessness. Sometimes in the mornings, though, she would decide to make a stew for the children’s evening meal. She would begin meticulously, peeling carrots and slicing them on the diagonal so that she could carve them into little ovals, and then she would carve the potatoes the same way. It gave her great pleasure to serve a stew with coordinated vegetables. All the little olive-shaped carrots and potatoes would lie in segregated heaps on waxed paper next to the sink, and then she would cube the meat, carefully cutting away all the fat. But when she took out the wide skillet in which she would have to brown each separate cube of beef, she would envision herself standing there by the stove, closely monitoring the heat and turning each little cube from side to side—six sides for each, in all—so that when she finished, the sizzling oil would have risen from the pan in a transparent mist