![]() At the dinner table, when they were still living in one house, Perry had looked from one to the other of them as if they came from the moon. Demeter hoped it would be music: she wanted Perry to be darker and more complicated. Hank hoped it would be science: he wanted his daughter to be straightforward and rational. She hadn’t yet found the thing she might be very good at. They had named her Elizabeth, after Hank’s mother, but Hank started calling her Perry Mason early on, for her steady infant gaze that would break down any witness, and it stuck.Īt thirteen, Perry had the pert features and turned-up nose of a figure skater, although she wasn’t one. They hadn’t named her Persephone that would have been unfair. But the moment Demeter saw the pink thing in the nurse’s arms, the tiny creature that had turned her inside out, she knew the baby wasn’t going to save her marriage. Perry, their daughter, had been unexpected, the pregnancy a buoyant gift at a time when Demeter and Hank were like drowning people, tugging each other under. He would not have it said that he took a child from her mother. But granting her half the year had been a gesture on his part: generosity as a sign of power. Hank could have fought for sole custody, since Demeter had a reputation for erratic behavior. She couldn’t handle giving her up in the dead of winter. It meant that she delivered her daughter to her ex-husband in the late, bright Montana summer and she could handle it then, most of the time, with a little pharmaceutical help. When they divided up the year, Demeter chose, for her own, the months when the days start getting longer. ![]()
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