Chapter 13

After I'd put my gun away, and had a snack, and sat on the sofa reading a while, and got a shower, Cecelia and I went to bed. Darlia had gone earlier, for she had to get to school in the morning. I was in bed first, and Cecelia got in a few minutes later – surprising me by leaving the lamp on her bedside table on. Normally she turns it off before she goes to bed.

She propped herself up on her right elbow, looking at me. She was wearing a long sleeved nightgown, but I knew what her arm would look like bent that way, the muscle bunched up under the milk chocolate skin. I knew that if I prodded that muscle with a finger it would be hard, built up from decades of hard work and lifting weights. Just when I was about to ask what she wanted, Cecelia said, "Do you think that you were perhaps a bit hard on Darlia today?"

"I hadn't thought about it."

"I am not criticizing you, Darvin. I am wondering. It is possible that you were too hard on her; it is also possible that I tend to treat her more gently than is appropriate."

I considered the incident at the table. "I don't know, C. In the past year or two things that I always thought were cute have started to be a bit annoying. I don't know whether it's just that I'm getting tired of 'em, or Darlia's outgrowing 'em and ought to quit, or what. But things where she and I used to join forces to tease you about, I now find annoy me a bit."

"I remember that you chided her, when we were in Lanfair Valley, about her little girl term for our displays of affection."

"Yeah," I said. "It was real cute when she was four. But she's gonna be 11 now. An' 'kissy-kissy' and dropping syllables if the word's a long one are getting old."

Cecelia looked at me for a moment. "Please do not take this as a condemnation, Darvin," she said, "but I have listened to your English since 1994."

"Yeah..."

"It is true that you can, when you wish it, speak as properly as I can. It is true that sometimes you do so. But it is also true that Darlia learned her sloppy habits from listening to you. Of course her natural preference is that way, or else she would have imitated me. Nevertheless, your example is a factor in how she speaks today."

"Yeah..." I seemed to have run out of other words.

"I have long teased you about your English, my husband, and you have taken it as such. I learned almost as soon as we met that you use correct English when it's appropriate, and so I have never tried to reform you. I propose a question in light of that: Ought you to be so hard on Darlia?"

"I don't know if I was hard on her," I said. "Maybe so. Maybe this case, and accumulating tiredness with her sloppiness, just piled on and I came down harder than I should have. But you know my position – it's not a sin to speak casually, if you can do it right when you have to."

"And while I prefer to speak correct English at all times, I have not quarreled with your assessment of the situation. You've taught that principle to Darlia, and I have concurred, for it is not invalid. If someone's going to mangle the language, it behooves him to know that he's mangling it."

"So was I hard on her?" I asked.

Cecelia's eyes dropped while she thought. When she spoke she looked down at the bed, and it sounded as though she were thinking it through just in advance of her words. "It may be that I have been too easy on her. I have, yes, chaffed her for her emulation of your English. But have I ever actually taught her how much I care about the proper use of our tongue? I can't say that I have. And perhaps today was simply the fruit of my laxity."

"Shoot, C, if she's spoilt it's both our fault, not just yourn."

She smiled slightly at my English, which was down to my usual sloppy standard. "Yes, that's true – we both share the responsibility for whatever Darlia has become. Between the genetic material we both contributed, and the teaching we have given her, neither of us can point to the other and assign unilateral blame. Nonetheless, Darvin, I look back over my career as a mother, and I believe I see multiple instances where I could have been firmer."

"Probably they ain't a parent anywhere who can't find fault with what she's done, or not done. I ain't perfect my own self." I rolled over on my back, and put my hands behind my head. I looked up at the ceiling as I continued. "I can't see that I come down on Darlia too hard today, but I can't see that you've been too soft either. Maybe we neither of us is seein' real clear, nor have we either of us done the best possible job."

"For a westerner, you sure sound southern at times." It was a tangent, and she didn't give me a chance to answer it. "Shared responsibility, shared failure?"

"Are we failures, C? I don't think so. Shoot, Darlia ain't but 10 goin' on 11. We won't know if we failed for a bit yet. But I look at her, the way she is, the way she obeys, all that, and I think we've got us a good girl. Some of that's natural – she's just that way, nice and obedient. But some of it's us too, it's gotta be. Nature and nurture, we decided a good while back. An' I can't see that the nurture's been faulty, not dramatically anyways."