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pregnant, threw her purse on the floor like a dagger, kicked her shoes at Quoyle and said she’d get an abortion, Quoyle loved, first Bunny, then Sunshine, loved them with a kind of fear that if they made it into the world they were with him on borrowed time, would one day run a wire into his brain through terrible event. He never guessed it would be Petal. Thought he’d already had the worst from her.

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    The aunt, in a black and white checked pantsuit, sat on the sofa, listened to Quoyle choke and sob. Made tea in the never-used pot. A stiff-figured woman, gingery hair streaked with white. Presented a profile like a target in a shooting gallery. A buff mole on her neck. Swirled the tea around in the pot, poured, dribbled milk. Her coat, bent over the arm of the sofa, resembled a wine steward showing a label.
    “You drink that. Tea is a good drink, it’ll keep you going. That’s the truth.” Her voice had a whistling harmonic as from the cracked-open window of a speeding car. Body in sections, like a dress form.
    “I never really knew her,” he said, “except that she was driven by terrible forces. She had to live her life her own way. She said that a million times.” The slovenly room was full of reflecting surfaces accusing him, the teapot, the photographs, his wedding ring, magazine covers, a spoon, the television screen.
    “Drink some tea.”
    “Some people probably thought she was bad, but I think she was starved for love. I think she just couldn’t get enough love. [24] That’s why she was the way she was. Deep down she didn’t have a good opinion of herself. Those things she did—they reassured her for a little while. I wasn’t enough for her.”
    Did he believe that pap, the aunt wondered? She guessed that this was Quoyle’s invention, this love-starved Petal. Took one look at the arctic eyes, the rigidly seductive pose of Petal’s photograph, Quoyle’s silly rose in a water glass beside it, and thought to herself, there was a bitch in high heels.

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    Quoyle had gasped, the phone to his ear, loss flooding in like the sea gushing into a broken hull. They said the Geo had veered off the expressway and rolled down a bank sown with native wild flowers, caught on fire. Smoke poured from the real estate agent’s chest, Petal’s hair burned. Her neck broken.
    Newspaper clippings blew out of the car, along the highway; reports of a monstrous egg in Texas, a fungus in the likeness of Jascha Heifetz, a turnip as large as a pumpkin, a pumpkin as small as a radish.
    The police, sorting through singed astrology magazines and clothes, found Petal’s purse crammed with more than nine thousand dollars in cash, her calendar book with a notation to meet Bruce Cudd on the morning before the accident. In Bacon Falls, Connecticut. There was a receipt for seven thousand dollars in exchange for “personal services.” Looked like she had sold the children to Bruce Cudd, the police said.
    Quoyle, in his living room, blubbing through red fingers, said he could forgive Petal anything if the children were safe.
    Why do we weep in grief, the aunt wondered. Dogs, deer, birds suffered with dry eyes and in silence. The dumb suffering of animals. Probably a survival technique.
    “You’re good-hearted,” she said. “Some would curse her mangled body for selling the little girls.” The milk on the verge of turning. Tan knobs in the sugar bowl from wet coffee spoons.
    “I will never believe that, that she sold them. Never,” cried Quoyle. His thigh clashed against the table. The sofa creaked.
    “Maybe she didn’t. Who knows?” The aunt soothed. “Yes, [25] you’re good-hearted. You take after Sian Quoyle. Your poor grandfather. I never knew him. Dead before I was born. But I saw the picture of him many times, the tooth of a dead man hanging on a string around his neck. To keep toothache away. They believed in that. But he was very good-natured they said. Laughed and sang. Anybody could fool him with a