Chapter 30

The days passed like that, with me doing a little bit of work as an elder, doing a little bit of paying work as a PI, hanging around the house with Cecelia and Darlia, walking now and then – life as normal, except I couldn't ever completely forget that a friend was in another state with the man who'd destroyed a large portion of her life. Forgiveness is one thing, but forgetfulness is another. I reject out of hand the saying about forgiving but never forgetting – the one requires the other – but that didn't make it any easier for me to put Vern's past out of my mind. It was like a sore tooth, always there no matter what I did.

And then came the first Wednesday in December. Alan had allowed Cecelia and I to drop Al off at the airport, but after two weeks you couldn't have kept him from meeting her plane if you'd nailed him to the floor. He'd have found some way to get loose and meet her, and I knew exactly how he felt, for I love Cecelia that way.

So I waited at home, while Cecelia was out running – she'd said she'd be back after five miles or so. She doesn't run as often as she lifts weights – the weights are a daily thing with few exceptions, while she only goes out and runs once or twice a week. But she's in such phenomenal shape that she can run forever, though not necessarily at great speed. If she ever decided to focus on running instead of lifting she could win marathons.

She hadn't said, and I didn't ask, but I knew from the clock that she'd timed her run so that she'd be out when Al and Alan came by. She's their friend too, but she married me while Al was on her three-year hiding time, having run from her former pimp. It was Cecelia who'd saved me from the worst depression of my life to that point by coming to love me, while I came to love her. Al had fled in the summer of 94, and I'd met Cecelia that September, and we'd gotten married the following spring. I hadn't known Al much longer than I'd known Cecelia, but it was long enough that she was more one of my friends than our friends.

So I sat on the sofa, trying to forget Vernon while I read my latest book, A Tan and Sandy Silence. It's one of the Travis McGee mysteries that I'd been thinking about a couple of weeks before, and it's got its share of McGee's hypocritical moralizing in it. But aside from the pompous lectures, McGee's an interesting character, and the characters are why I read mysteries – or SF, or westerns, or anything else. If the people are boring nothing else will get my attention, but interesting characters can make up for a lot of imperfections elsewhere.

I heard car doors slamming outside, and got up to look out the bay window in the dining room. We've got peepholes in the front door, one at adult height and another we installed for Darlia, but unless someone's right in front of the door they're not a lot of use. I saw it was Alan and Al, and I dogeared the book, set it in the window seat, and opened the door just as they got there.

I hugged Al, and shook Alan's hand and put an arm briefly around his shoulders, as I ushered them into the house. "Cecelia's out running," I told them, "so we've got the place to ourselves."

Alan nodded. "She's very considerate."

"She is that." I went into the kitchen and got us all Cokes, and we sat at the dining room table. "But I prefer my attitude about exercise." At their blank looks I said, "Exercise is wonderful – I could sit and watch it all day."

They laughed at that, which didn't surprise me, since it's not one of my jokes. Larry Niven put it in Louis Wu's mouth, in Ringworld if I remember right. By the time Ringworld Engineers opens Louis's living on Canyon – in what the kzinti call the Gash on Warhead – and exercising when he's not stimulating his pleasure center with a trickle of electric current. Of course all that SF info wasn't out in the open, just in the back of my head, and while Al would have gotten the reference if I explained it and might even have recognized the joke, Alan doesn't care for SF.

"Well," Al said when we'd all settled down, "I'm back. I haven't told Alan much about the trip yet – I wanted to tell you both at the same time."

"What I can't feature," I said, "is why you want me in on it."

"Because, Cowboy, you helped me out as much as Alan did, at least at first. If you hadn't taken care of Bennie that day, I could never have left, and Alan would have gotten hurt. If you hadn't hunted for me for three years, I'd still be ... well, maybe I'd be dead by now, and if I was still alive I wouldn't be any prize. You've earned the right to know some things about me that no one else has, except my husband." And she leaned against him, her arm around his waist.

Alan put his arm across her shoulders. "We owe you, Darvin," he said. "The reason Al's a sweet wife and mother today instead of dead, or a bitter old prostitute, is you. So quit complaining." He was smiling a little when he said it, but he was serious too.

"Okay, I'm quitting," I said. "First, Al – how did he treat you?"

"Like a father should," she said, and tears began running down her face. She didn't change her position, or try to wipe them away. "After all these years, Cowboy, I've got my father back. He's my Daddy again."

"That's good. You know that I've been having trouble with ... with all this."

"Yeah. You've taken it harder than I did."

"Well, anyway I'm having a harder time getting over it." I took a drink of Coke. "How did it go when you visited your mother's grave?"