Read Honeydew: Stories for Free Online Page B

child’s affliction, his wife’s death, rest her soul, the necessity of finding a job near home. Victoria told him that she had been a youngest daughter persuaded by her sisters to quit art school and take care of their ailing mother. Mama kept ordering her to find a husband who could install all three in a better flat. Maybe if you cooked better…
    “She won’t last forever,” Victoria’s sisters had falsely assured her. Well, Mama was dead at last. Victoria was not sure she would ask God to rest her soul. “How does your older daughter occupy her time?” she said to Hector.
    His face shone. He was short, he had a little paunch (helped along by his recent indulgences), a lumpy nose, not much of a neck, a noticeable mole on one cheek. “She carves,” he said, his homely face continuing to beam. “She carves animals and small human figures.”
    Oh Lord, sweet little lambs, darling odalisques. She was sorry she’d asked.
    “Shall I show you?” His hand was already in his pocket. “Most are bigger; this is a mini.”
    It was the figure of a dog—a puppy, really—peeking in solemn distress, with no cuteness at all, from the jacket of a man. You knew it was a man because the buttons were on the right side and he was wearing a tie, its stripes delicately incised. He had no head and his torso ended just below the frayed jacket.
    “Are there more of these?” she asked sharply.
    “Many, many, but bigger.”
    “Does she sell them?”
    He shrugged. “There’s a man comes to look, takes one or two, comes back with a little money.”
    A pimp, she thought…“Perhaps I could do the same, and give you a bigger percentage.”
    He carefully wiped his mouth. “Miss Tarnapol—”
    “Victoria.”
    “Hector is my given name. Victoria, forgive me, who buys a carving here? People want tissue boxes decorated with shells.”
    “Yes, of course…but I still have friends in the art world. I was also a sought-after window dresser for a time. Hector…may I come and see the others?”
    “I will bring you two tomorrow.”
    He brought a unicorn and a round figure that looked at first like an unpainted Russian doll. The unicorn was smiling. The Russian doll’s carved face was not smiling, and her arms in relief, pressing themselves to her stomach, suggested that this would not be an easy labor, that she would perish from it, that the nine or ten dolls nested within her bulk would crumble there.
    “Your dealer probably gives you ten percent of what he actually gets for these. Let me try to sell them, and I will retain the ten percent and give the rest to you. I’ll peddle the unicorn first and put the doll in the gift-shop window as advertisement. ‘Not for Sale,’ the card will read…intriguing.”
    “Nobody will be intrigued by a woman about to die in childbirth.”
    “We’ll see.”
    She placed the unicorn in a gallery about to open in her own town of Godolphin, just over the Boston line. Then she persuaded the owner of a flourishing dress shop in fashionable downtown to display the next piece Hector brought her, a mynah bird with a stocking cap, each stitch visible. An environmentalist bought it, perhaps making sense of its ambiguous message. Victoria split her own commission with the dress-shop proprietor and from then on one of Camilla’s pieces always occupied a place of honor there. Some people began to come in not for the clothing, primarily, but to see what was on display, though everyone usually bought at least a skirt and sometimes a whole outfit.
      
    As the weather grew colder and school began, Joe and Acelle abandoned the woods for Joe’s house. They had to be quiet during this one shared afternoon hour. Neither of their families would approve of their blameless activity: reading Zeph’s anatomy book in Zeph’s monkish bedroom. They called the room Castle 3.
    Anatomy wasn’t altogether strange to them. In sex education, they had seen a coy diagram of a sperm shooting up toward his partner, the