Free Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont

don’t want anyone to see it until after they’ve been to the house.” Yes, from blocks to walls, Jack had built a house that day.

Deb’s cold sore bloomed, and the rest of her lip chapped. Not a natural chap but the kind she did to herself, biting and bothering, an adolescent habit that had made it past adolescence, past gnawing her toenails and cracking her back. The lip hurt, but not in a way she minded. Anyone who’d danced had an unusual patience for pain.
    “They’re just impenetrable to me. I don’t know when that happened,” she called from the slipcovered couch. “It’s like, if I say jump, they say, you know,
no.
They lie down.”
    At Ruth’s, she had no choice but to face her mother’s kid, herself. Ruth lived in a junior one bedroom downtown, in an apartment complex that made it seem hard to get to, and with each visit Deb startled at the number of photographs laid out, how the place seemed always to become more a shrine. There, on the bookcase nearest the door, was Deb, age five, performing a handstand stoically against a wall at home in Tenafly, and at nine, eating frozen custard on the boardwalk at Point Pleasant when her father was still alive. A pink-tulled sweet sixteen was under way on the mantle over the television, all her ballet friends posing beside pizza and sparkling cider in Dixie cups, Deb with horrible aqua eyeliner and a mouth full of braces. Her career at City Ballet was born atop the CD changer, where she was beaming backstage in red and blue for
Stars and Stripes,
and died with
The Nutcracker
in the carousel frame between two wicker chairs, the season she’d danced Marzipan. Beside that a rickety wood-veneer liquor cart collected not bottles but Simons and Kays at all heights and ages, enough for a flip-book.
    “Maybe you could try sending them to somebody,” Ruth said in the kitchen.
    “I think that ship sort of sailed.” Simon had gone to a psychiatrist the year before, after what happened at the Best Buy. He’d come home complaining that the lady was half-deaf and smelled of vitamins. She’d told him he could talk about whatever he wanted, so Simon had talked about videogames.
    “So they don’t like to talk.” Ruth came out carrying a mug with a thumb rest and a handful of her pills. “Well, they’re definitely yours.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Deb asked as Ruth delivered the pills, then the mug, to her mouth, swallowing with a sharp backward kick of her head. “Really, Mom, do you have to take them like that?”
    “How am I supposed to take them?”
    “Nothing, just it’s dramatic.”
    “Deborah.” Ruth put a hand in the air, palm out, where it tremored and failed to make her point. “What is your problem? Say.”
    “I don’t know. It seems ridiculous all of a sudden. That I
wanted
to work it out.”
    Ruth sat and leaned her hand with the mug on her daughter’s knee. “What changed?”
    “Reading it? I don’t know, believing? And I
want
Kay to be able to tell me what she’s feeling. I don’t
want
Simon to think of me as a person who lets these things happen.”
    “You want to set an example. But everything’s black and white at their age. Give yourself a break. You’ll make yourself crazy. Not everything is so cut and dry.”
    Deb was thinking, why does everybody cry. Stupid to cry; what does it do? What does it get out? “Do you know, I keep thinking of what you told me, when you knew I was pregnant.” She meant the first time, when her mother had tried to talk her out of it. You’re twenty-six, Deborah. I’m old enough. He’s a married man. I don’t care. What about dancing? Dancing is who cares. Dancing over.
    “What did I say?”
    “You said, ‘What do you want a child for? You will never again know when it is safe to feel happy.’ ”
    “Sure,” Ruth nodded her small blond head. “Like having your heart walk around outside your body the rest of your life.” She stood and walked back to the kitchen. “Am I