“That’s Mexico,” Cub said. “This is here.”

“Yeah. You know what I keep thinking? Our house is ours,” she said. “It’s not much, and I’m the first one to say it. But we’ve made every payment since we married. The house is the one thing you and I have got.”

Her intensity got his attention. “Did you tell him about that business in Mexico?”

She knew who he meant. Ovid Byron. “No, I haven’t. It’s too weird. It’s like the butterflies came here, and we might be next. Like they’re a sign of something.” She was trying to keep the scientists out of her argument for keeping the mountain intact. Their wonder, their global worries, these of all things would not help her case with Cub. Teams had been chosen, and the scientists were not us, they were them. That’s how Cub would see it. Everyone had to play.

“This rain won’t keep up,” he said. “They’re saying it’s a hundred-year flood. So it won’t happen again for another hundred years.”

Dellarobia knew this was wrong, bad luck didn’t work that way. A person could have a long losing streak. But she didn’t understand that well enough to explain. “It just seems shortsighted,” she said. “If we log the mountain, then the trees are gone. But the debt isn’t. Does it make sense to turn everything upside down just to make one payment? Like there won’t be another one next month, and the month after that?”

“It’s just the one balloon. Things will perk up. Dad will get more contracts.”

“And meanwhile our house might get buried in mud, that’s the deal?”

“Dad says they wouldn’t log up there if there was any risk to it.”

“The hell they wouldn’t. You notice he’s not planning to do any logging up above his and Hester’s house.”

“Well, you try discussing it with Dad,” he said. “Would Preston like this?”

She took the flat, shrink-wrapped package he handed her. A dinosaur puzzle. “Not really,” she said. “That’s kind of for younger kids.” Not for the first time, she thought of Mako and Bonnie, wondering if they’d played with toys like these, or if their parents gave them educational things for a head start. If Preston wanted to go to college someday, he was already behind. That, too, went with playing on Cub’s team. She looked up from the puzzle.

“Do you know what they’re saying about the butterflies being here? Dr. Byron and them? They said it means something’s really gone wrong.”

“Wrong with what?” Cub asked.

“The whole earth, if you want to know. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff they said, Cub. It’s like the End of Days. They need some time to figure out what it all means. Don’t you think that’s kind of important?”

“Well, if the butterflies fly off somewhere, the doctor and them can go park their camper behind somebody else’s barn.”

“What if there’s no place else for them to fly away to?” she asked.

“There’s always someplace else to go,” Cub said, in a tone that said he was signing off: Worries like that are not for people like us. We have enough of our own. He wasn’t wrong.

“But what if there isn’t?” she persisted quietly.

“How about this, for Preston? I had these,” Cub said. Tinkertoys, or a plastic version of that, in an enormous boxed kit. It was not your father’s Tinkertoys, so to speak. Now they had countless extras, including a little motor to run your creations around on the floor until someone stepped on them and punctured an artery.

She and Cub both inhaled at the price. He put it back.

“So your dad says take the money and run. What do you say?”

“I don’t know.” Cub blew out his breath, looking at the ceiling. “It would just be nice to have some room. To have a real Christmas for the kids.”

It would be. Of course. She wanted the world for Cordie and Preston. But what did that even mean? “What’s real?” she asked. “Anything in this store? We should just buy them each a box of the most sugary cereal there is, and go home. They’re so young, would they really know the difference?”

Cordie might actually go for the sugar-pop Christmas, but Preston wouldn’t. Everyone got children so jacked up about Santa Claus. Preston had told his kindergarten teacher that Santa was bringing him a wristwatch, information that Miss Rose passed on to Dellarobia with a conspiratorial grin, as if she’d done the hard part. Now the parents only had to make the thing materialize. This afternoon she’d kept her eye out for a toy one, but what a letdown that would be, a plastic watch from Santa. She could already see her son’s brave Christmas-morning face, trying not to be disappointed. The watch he coveted was Mako’s, an outsize black thing with tiny yellow buttons, timers and such. Mako had let him play with it. Those students were sweet to Preston, nothing like television geeks, actually the opposite, surprisingly astute about a child’s interest and abilities. So now Preston had a killer crush on the whole bunch, dying for their notice. He spent afternoons lurking around the trailer pretending to turn over rocks, working his angles, provoking Dellarobia into a protective defensiveness. He shouldn’t throw himself on his sword out there. Why should he even see things he couldn’t have?

Cub was studying a large packaged thing that looked like a toy television, with appendages. “You know what he really wants. Super Mario Brothers and Battletron.”

“He just hears about those from other kids,” Dellarobia argued. “He doesn’t really know what they are yet.”

“We should get him a Wii.”

“So you could play with it,” she said, feeling exasperation rise.

“It’s educational,” Cub maintained.

“If you’re interested in your son’s education, get him a computer. If you happen to find a wallet full of money. He’s getting on the Internet over at Hester’s, looking at pictures. He can just about read, did you know that? He knows a bunch of words.”

“Great. If he turns out smart like you I’ll be outnumbered for good.”

She felt blindsided. “Being smart, you’re going to hold that against me? What kind of message is that sending the kids?”

“You tell me. If you want them to have a computer and stuff, we need the logging money. Or”—he spread his hands—“we can keep our trees. And be hicks.”