4.

Murray Mapes wanted to give his new daughter the feet she’d forgotten to carry out of the womb. By his own estimation, he’d been an inventor for twenty years at the time she was born. He liked to tell the story of how, at age five, he’d transformed three plywood boards, a handful of nails, and four industrial-sized rubber bands into a gun and turret mounted on a Radio Flyer wagon. The weapon could launch screws and nails up to twenty-seven feet.

In the following decades, Murray filed dozens of patents (the first at age twelve), including, but not limited to, the Clock Hat, the Squeezable Survival Kit, the Hood Wiperz, the Detachable Shirt Collar, the Hot Dog Pouch, the Pencil Pachyderm, the Collapsible Ukulele with Hairbrush, and the Moldproof Towel Organizer.

Murray’s habit was to pursue each new idea with an intensity approaching madness. Once a brainstorm hit him, he spent every free moment in the basement, from which issued clanks and buzzes, scrapings and explosions, celebrity impersonations, paroxysms of laughter, and, now and then, weeping. He pretty much drained his emotional well down there. If Misty and the twins saw Murray ten minutes each day during an invention jag, they felt blessed.

Then, three months after the idea first took shape in his mind, Murray would ascend from his dungeon. He would kick open the basement door, his clothes and hair covered in sawdust and metal shavings, bearing his new baby. He would promptly demonstrate the gadget to his wife, children, mother-in-law, and a few select neighbors, to varying degrees of applause.

That’s as far as Murray took any one idea. The fury of his initial passion left him exhausted and listless, and he was unable, or unwilling, or a combination of both, to actually thrust his inventions into the public sphere. Try as he might (“might” being the operative word) he could never find an investor to fund the production of his goods. And of course, there wasn’t enough money in the Mapes’s bank account to make the inventions anything more than conversation pieces in a future attic museum.

Daily bread found its way to the table because Murray worked the line at Hanson Mold, a factory that made plastic injection molds for automobiles. It was a thankless, noisy existence. Murray hunched hour after hour in the shadow of the 300T Castmaster press, far from natural light and fresh air. By age forty, half of his hearing would be gone, causing him to shout for his salt and pepper. Red trenches from the safety goggles would become permanent circles around his eyes. His palms would thicken with calluses from repeated burns. His fingers would chap and split.

But that was years later. And on the plus side, Hanson Mold was the type of repetitive, mindless, union-protected work that allowed a man to daydream. While the radio rocked “Running on Empty” and “Point of Know Return” for the hundredth time in a month, and while his coworkers bickered about the pros and cons of low-cal shortening substitutes as a way of diverting their attentions from their indignation over the latest infringement on personal rights (Article 4.9.4 of the Standard Operating Procedures now stipulated that all mustaches had to be “well-groomed”), Murray lived somewhere else, sketching in his mind (and during lunch breaks, on McDonald’s bags), the perfect pair of prosthetic feet for his breathtaking new daughter.

Audrey was a comely baby; this much is indisputable, no matter how twisted and grotesque people try to make her in legend.

Henri Rousseau said, “Beauty is the promise of happiness.”

Notice that the “promise of happiness” is all it takes. No actual happiness is necessary.

Audrey was beautiful like the fever that kills a virus. Like a vivid dream of an ex-lover. Like a perfect beach moment just before the carnation horizon is swallowed by a night so complete you forget pink is a color. Like a fat, barn-red apple straddling the line between ripeness and rot.

Audrey stole the breath of all passersby who happened to glance into the stroller Misty piloted to the supermarket. Half a dozen times a day, a bespectacled old retiree leaned in, blew kisses, and tried to stammer out a verbal appraisal of Audrey’s intense splendor. An impossible task. Misty smiled, her eyes flashing a crumb-sized speck of doubt, or maybe exhaustion, and offered a quiet, “You’re sweet to say so,” or, “She takes after her daddy,” before bustling away.

McKenna and Toby trailed behind, kicking pebbles.