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“You look; you know how.” Buttercup’s parents did not have exactly what you might call a happy marriage. All they ever dreamed of was leaving each other.

Buttercup’s father shrugged and went back to the window. “Ahhhh,” he said after a while. And a little later, again, “Ahhhh.”Advertisement

Buttercup’s mother glanced up briefly from her cooking.

“Such riches,” Buttercup’s father said. “Glorious.”

Buttercup’s mother hesitated, then put her stew spoon down. (This was after stew, but so is everything. When the first man first clambered from the slime and made his first home on land, what he had for supper that first night was stew.)

“The heart swells at the magnificence,” Buttercup’s father muttered very loudly.

“What exactly is it, dumpling?” Buttercup’s mother wanted to know.

“You look; you know how” was all he replied. (This was their thirty-third spat of the day—this was long after spats—and he was behind, thirteen to twenty, but he had made up a lot of distance since lunch, when it was seventeen to two against him.)

“Donkey,” the mother said, and came over to the window. A moment later she was going “Ahhh” right along with him.

They stood there, the two of them, tiny and awed.

From setting the dinner table, Buttercup watched them.

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“They must be going to meet Prince Humperdinck someplace,” Buttercup’s mother said.

The father nodded. “Hunting. That’s what the Prince does.”

“How lucky we are to have seen them pass by,” Buttercup’s mother said, and she took her husband’s hand.

The old man nodded. “Now I can die.”

She glanced at him. “Don’t.” Her tone was surprisingly tender, and probably she sensed how important he really was to her, because when he did die, two years further on, she went right after, and most of the people who knew her well agreed it was the sudden lack of opposition that undid her.

Buttercup came close and stood behind them, staring over them, and soon she was gasping too, because the Count and Countess and all their pages and soldiers and servants and courtiers and champions and carriages were passing by the cart track at the front of the farm.

The three stood in silence as the procession moved forward. Buttercup’s father was a tiny mutt of a man who had always dreamed of living like the Count. He had once been two miles from where the Count and Prince had been hunting, and until this moment that had been the high point of his life. He was a terrible farmer, and not much of a husband either. There wasn’t really much in this world he excelled at, and he could never quite figure out how he happened to sire his daughter, but he knew, deep down, that it must have been some kind of wonderful mistake, the nature of which he had no intention of investigating.

Buttercup’s mother was a gnarled shrimp of a woman, thorny and worrying, who had always dreamed of somehow just once being popular, like the Countess was said to be. She was a terrible cook, an even more limited housekeeper. How Buttercup slid from her womb was, of course, beyond her. But she had been there when it happened; that was enough for her.

Buttercup herself, standing half a head over her parents, still holding the dinner dishes, still smelling of Horse, only wished that the great procession wasn’t quite so far away, so she could see if the Countess’s clothes really were all that lovely.

As if in answer to her request, the procession turned and began entering the farm.

“Here?” Buttercup’s father managed. “My God, why?”

Buttercup’s mother whirled on him. “Did you forget to pay your taxes?” (This was after taxes. But everything is after taxes. Taxes were here even before stew.) pqdm.com