Chapter 21

I woke up in the morning and heard Cecelia or Darlia, or both, moving around, and decided that I wanted to see Straight. He'd get off at nine – and so I had to decide if I wanted to get up and catch him before he did, or sleep late and go see him after he came on very early the next morning. I decided to wait, and dozed off again.

When I woke up for good, I looked at my alarm clock and saw that it was, in fact, just after nine. I got up and put on a pair of sweat pants, and wandered shirtless into the living room. Cecelia was there, stretching in the carpeted area between the sofa and the wood floor of the dining room. She can get into positions that I swear a yogi would have trouble with – just then she had her legs stretched out in different directions, and her body laid flat along one of them and her hand gripping her toes. I shook my head and went to get a Coke from the refrigerator.

When I got back Cecelia had gotten to her feet and was watching me. She had on a pair of sweat pants too, and a sweatshirt with sleeves that had originally been long but which she'd chopped off just above the elbow. She was wearing running shoes, and her face had a slight sheen that her stretching had brought out. "Y'all goin' for a run?" I asked.

"Yes. Normally I wait till later in the day, but Susan offered to take Darlia to school, so I'm ahead of my schedule."

"So that's what you do when I'm out all day."

"If you don't know, by now, what I do with my days, then I would like to know what you use to keep your ears apart."

"Since any other answer would be harmful to my self-respect, I'll admit that I do know what you do during the day."

She smiled. "I see that you are learning not to fight the inevitable. I shall one day stand back and look at you, and see a perfectly trained husband."

"Give it time, C – give it time."

She presented her face for a kiss, and I gladly gave it to her. She headed out for her run – she runs two or three times a week, and it would be miles before she returned – and I closed the door behind her. Now that I was alone in the house I had a sense of what Cecelia did all day ... actually it was more a sense of the environment in which she did it. I know she sews and cooks and cleans and grows flowers in season and works out, but I don't know if that's all she does. I did know, by experience now, that she does it in an empty house. I'd known it intellectually, but I'm so seldom at home during the weekday that the experience was enlightening.

I wandered through the rooms, considering the difference that people make in a house. Darlia's room was silent, our bedroom was quiet, and the living room and dining room were dormant. My study even seemed to have imbibed some of the emptiness of a house with no one in it but me.

I peeked into the refrigerator, and found nothing that appealed to me. Even the remnants of my sort-of picnic left me cold, and the pizza I'd thought I might eat didn't interest me. In the cabinet I found equally nothing. I opened the freezer, and there was a box of frozen taquitos. I put a paper towel on a plate and set out half a dozen of them. I put the box back in the freezer and nuked the taquitos for a couple of minutes. They came out hot, and I took them into the dining room and ate them while reading my book. Usually when I'm snacking I sit on the sofa, but sometimes I actually pretend I'm civilized. One of the things Cecelia had to get used to when we got married was my habit of snacking on the sofa, but she did get used to it. Another – and this was easier for her – was my habit of reading while I eat. When we're a family together I leave the book behind, but when it's just one or two of us I usually read and eat simultaneously. I can just barely remember the fuss people made over Amy Carter reading at the table in the White House, but I really wasn't all that interested in politics when I was 11 and 12 years old.

When I finished the taquitos I put the paper towel in the trash and the plate in the sink. I took the book to the sofa and sat down there and read while I worked on my Coke. There's something about a third person approach to a mystery novel that doesn't, to me anyway, make the story as immediate, but it was still a good book. I'm sure there are people who find things to dislike in my poetry – not that I've ever sold a lot of poetry. If I had to make a living as a poet I'd have to get a job at Wal-Mart or somewhere, because poetry just doesn't pay. T.S. Eliot worked all his life as a banker, even after becoming a famous poet. Ezra Pound made his living with other literary endeavors in order to support his poetry. Poets are not the darlings of American society, nor indeed of the world. The most recognition a poet usually gets is if he's in a Latin American country and opposes the government – then he gets attention, and probably wishes they'd never noticed him.

But ruminating about poetry was just a mental sidelight; my attention focused mostly on the book. After a bit I realized I didn't have any music going, and so I grabbed the radio remote off the coffee table and turned things on. I couldn't find anything on the radio I liked, which is not a new experience, so I switched over to the CD player. Right now it had a Bob Wills compilation in it, and I tapped my foot to western swing while I got back into the question of why someone was stealing every copy of a self-published local history he – or she – or they – could get his or her or their hands on.

After a while I got restless, and dogeared the book, turned off the CD player, and went into my study. I stood for a moment in the doorway. I still didn't have any useful ideas about how to deal with the crowding. Maybe when I got done with this job I could put my mind to work on it better, but for now I was coming up blank.

I sat down at the computer and turned on the CD player which sits beside the monitor. It was a Ricky Skaggs CD in this one, Country Pride. While the music played I launched Pacific War, an old DOS-based game that will run under Windows. I've had it for years, since the days when Windows 3.1 was the current version and wasn't much better than a DOS shell. I've never bothered to check whether there's a newer, Windows-based version, though there probably is ... or not. These days people don't have the patience for PacWar, which is a World War II strategy game rather than a shoot-'em-up video game. Each turn is a week, which means that you're looking at 200 turns or more – a lengthy proposition if you're playing against another person. I always play against the computer, and even then it's not a quick game.

While Ricky sang and picked, I manipulated task forces and divisions to try to take back islands the Japanese had captured in the opening months of the computerized war. I had opted for a historical beginning when I started this game, but it doesn't take long for things to diverge from history. Wake had held out much longer in the game than it did in real life, and I'd made the mistake of trying to capture a base on New Britain far too early in the war. Finally I'd abandoned that idea, and put the South Pacific Area under computer control and taken over the Central Pacific. And as it happened it was just a few turns later that American production finally took hold, and I began getting aircraft carriers. Without carriers it's impossible to fight any sort of war in the Pacific Ocean, at least not using 1940s technology. Even today I'd hate to try it – aerial refueling and 24-hour missions have their limits.

I don't know how long I played the game, but it had been a while when I heard the front door close and knew Cecelia was back. I didn't bother to greet her – I knew she'd want a shower before she was willing to do more than give me a token kiss. When she's sweaty is the one time she hates to cling. She did reach in and tap on the door as she went by, and I waved a hand at her.

I finished the turn I was on, and saved the game. I went into the kitchen, realizing that I was hungry again. I rummaged around, and found some flour tortillas that Cecelia had bought from an old Chicana in the South Valley, and some already-fried ground beef, and lettuce and a couple of tomatoes and an onion. We always have cheese of one kind or another – usually multiple kinds. I grabbed a hunk of extra sharp cheddar.

I took all these ingredients and put them on the counter. I dumped the meat into a bowl and nuked it for a minute. I fished a grater out of a drawer and grated a bowl full of cheese. I chopped up lettuce, and the tomatoes, and about half of the onion. I'm not a cook, nor anything like thereunto, but I can use a microwave and a knife.

What I was fixing was what we call tacos. I never even heard of a taco shell till I was grown, or nearly so, and I expect that our "tacos" are really more like burritos – though I wonder just how much resemblance either one has to actual Mexican food. Neither Cecelia nor I have ever been to Mexico – indeed, neither of us has ever been out of the country. We've just never taken the notion to go outside the borders, though we've gone any number of places inside the United States. My brother Memphis has visited multiple countries, and spent two years in Korea, which is where he married his wife. And now he almost never leaves the Lahtkwa reservation in Washington, while my family and I travel all around the country on a regular basis.