Chapter 4

I didn't sleep well Friday night, and was up early Saturday morning. The temperature was comfortable in the house, and I put on my jeans and a regular shirt, not one of the heavy winter shirts. My feet I kept bare since I wasn't planning on going outside. I didn't tuck the shirt in, but let the tails hang outside my jeans.

I went into my study and checked my e-mail, both business and personal. There was the usual proportion of junk and scams in both mail boxes. There wasn't anything important in the business box, and not much in the personal one. I answered as best as I could those messages that needed an answer.

When I was done I changed my Webshots over from images of the California coast to scenes of the Sandia Mountains and started the screensaver. I watched the changing pictures but didn't really see them. The plan that had begun forming the evening before was firm in my mind, as sometimes happens. I'll go to bed with at best some half-baked ideas in my head, and wake up with everything nice and neat. It doesn't happen that way all the time, but enough that I don't worry too much if I don't have the answer when I go to sleep.

My plan couldn't go into execution until Monday. I knew I could find the home phone number of the person I wanted to call, but I also knew that would get me nothing but a lecture on proper business hours. I wasn't in the mood for lectures, particularly not when I couldn't do anything but listen. I wanted action, but since I couldn't get it I certainly didn't care to have someone chew me out.

I thought about studying for Sunday School, but I wasn't really up to it. I wasn't ready to break down this morning, but my mind wouldn't focus. I felt like someone had bruised me in an intangible way. My thoughts would fasten on something clear for a moment, and then it would all dissolve into vapor. If I tried to study I'd find myself going over the same thing again and again with nothing sticking in my mind, or else going through it all and knowing nothing when I got to the end.

I got up and wandered into the living room. I could turn on the TV, but they don't have Saturday morning cartoons like they did when I was a kid ... not that I'd seen 'em a lot growing up in the middle of Lanfair Valley. The only time we could see TV was when we went into San Bernardino or LA for some reason; in Needles you could get TV, but nothing we did there put us in the way of watching it.

I could turn on some music, but I wasn't in the mood. I can't live without music; I play it when I'm reading, when I'm doing stuff on the computer, when I'm studying, when I'm driving down the road. But this morning nothing appealed to me, not the radio and not any of my CDs. I stood irresolutely in the middle of the room for a moment and then realized I was hungry. I'd not had any supper the night before; my grief had exhausted me and I'd gone to bed without eating.

I turned and went into the kitchen. The oversized refrigerator – not quite as large as you'd find in a restaurant, maybe, but large enough for Cecelia's insistence on fresh ingredients for her cooking – stood between the back door and the stove. I opened the doors and looked. There was a bowl of fruit salad, with plastic over the top of it. That would do nicely. I suspected Cecelia had intended it for supper the night before, but it would be a good breakfast – not that I eat breakfast ... not that I admit to eating breakfast, anyway.

I got a bowl out of the cabinet and a big spoon out of the drawer. I dipped the bowl full, put the plastic back over the fruit salad, and put it back into the fridge. I put the big spoon in the sink and got one for eating. I carried the bowl into the living room and sprawled down on the sofa. Cecelia doesn't really like me eating that way, with the bowl balanced on my chest, but I wasn't really concerned just then with the niceties.

My book was still on the coffee table where I'd left it the day before. I picked it up and began reading while I spooned fruit salad into my mouth. It was just what I needed. Heinlein's writing at that point in his life - Citizen of the Galaxy dates from 1957, eight years before I was born – was good, but simple, without any of the pseudo-profound stuff that got into his last few books. His ideas were there, certainly, but not in the outlandish way that you found 'em in such stuff as The Number of the Beast. I had long ago concluded that before he died Heinlein had just gone weird, and decided to push sexual anarchy on all his readers.

But in 57 he wasn't that way. And the story's a good one, though in my opinion the best part is at the beginning, when Thorby's with Baslim the Cripple. But I'm not an editor, and probably no publisher would hire me to be one. For one thing I've never been to college.

I ate fruit salad and lost myself in the story.

On Saturday we don't any of us have a specific time to get up, but usually Cecelia and Darlia are moving around by 8. So it was that morning. I was still involved in my book, the bowl from which I'd eaten fruit salad forgotten on the coffee table, when I felt someone sit down next to me. I looked up and it was Cecelia. She smiled at me and asked, "How are you this morning?"

"I'll live, I think."

"I know you will, my husband. And thinking that you will is an improvement over your despondency of last night."

"Yeah – I guess if you'd asked me I'd have wondered about it ... though in reality I don't doubt it. Eventually," I said, getting serious, "I know I'll die, but I don't plan on it and I don't expect it for a good while yet."

"Nor should you. I expect us to be together for another 40 years or so."

"Hmmm, that would give us what, a 51-year marriage?"