Free A Rhinestone Button by Gail Anderson-Dargatz Page A

flicked his hands as if to drop them, but the sensation persisted. “Can’t the dishes wait?” he said. “The machine’s not even half full.”
    “If I don’t, I’ll run out of cups and cutlery.”
    Jacob strode out of his son’s bedroom, red-faced. “Can’t you two shut up?” he said. “Squabbling like children. I could hear you through the door.”
    The phone rang and Jacob answered it. Lilith switched off the dishwasher. She and Job listened to Ben’s sobs, toJacob’s side of the conversation. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. Well, I don’t know.” Finally he said, “All right then,” and hung up the phone. He sat at the kitchen table. “There’s a camera crew on the way here. They want to interview you.”
    “A what?” said Job.
    “That was a guy from ITV. They’re coming out this way for another story and want to talk to you for a spot for the evening news, to end off the show. About that crop circle. They’ll be here in about twenty minutes.”
    Job jumped up, ran for the door. “There’s no time. I don’t have any clean shirts.” He scrambled to the cabin, got himself dressed in a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Ran back to the house to see if he could borrow a clean shirt from Jacob.
    Job slid off his runners and walked into the kitchen, just as a cat screech set off an explosion of green jagged lightning. Grace, wet through, shot out of the dishwasher as Lilith opened the machine. The cat slid across the floor into the kitchen hallway and scrambled out the hole in the screen door.
    “What the
hell?
”
    “Your cat shit in my shoes!”
    Job looked behind him into the hallway, directed by Lilith’s bony finger, and saw a two-sectioned turd in Lilith’s yellow Sunday pumps. “So you put her in the dishwasher?”
    “Just for a minute. It’s not like I was going to let her drown.”
    Job saw in Lilith’s eyes the wild look he’d seen in gadding cattle, cows crazed by the larvae of warble flies burrowing into their skin, and decided against pressing the matter further.
    “I need a clean shirt,” he said.
    “Jacob’s shirts would be way too big.”
    “Does Ben have anything that would fit? Some oversized shirt.”
    “Not big enough for you.”
    “How about you?”
    “You want to borrow one of my blouses?”
    “I’ve got to find a shirt. I can’t go on TV like this. What would people think?”
    “Borrow one from Will, then.”
    Job slipped on his runners, ran to his truck, praying that it would start. When it didn’t, he headed down the road for Will’s house at full run. As he reached the poultry barn, Will was just getting out of his truck in the yard. Ed came out of the barn to meet him. Job was about to raise a hand to catch their attention when Will kissed Ed on the lips. It was brief and tender, the kiss a husband gives a wife on returning home. He brushed something off Ed’s cheek and grinned before heading towards the house.
    Job turned the corner, hid behind the barn, felt the sun-hot wall against his palms as he listened to Will’s footfalls on the steps to the house, the duck’s quack greeting him as he opened the door, the screen door snapping shut.
    Job headed back home, slowly now, his feet in concrete, his skull a pot of churning porridge. The heads of timothy grass in the hayfields were a stunning green, lit from within. A thing he’d never seen before, or noticed. Then a startled squawk, a flurry above him, a
thwack
to the back of his head, the bounce and quick flicker of feathers, and his hands were in front of him, instinctively reaching out for the thing falling into his arms. A duck.
    A beautiful thing. A bufflehead. A large white patch on the back of its head; shimmering forest-green and eggplant plumage on the front. Black and white body. He felt for a pulse and found it was dead. Checked for a bullet hole and blood, but there was none. He remembered a thing his father had said, that ducks sometimes die of heart attack in the air. The exertion of achieving