Chapter 8

In the kitchen I poked my head into the refrigerator, and found that Cecelia had foreseen my hunger. I keep boxes and cans in the cabinets for those times when I'm hungry and there's nothing ready, since I can cook about as well as I can fly to Venus on a sunbeam, but more and more these days I find that I don't need to turn to my stopgaps. As I looked into the refrigerator, I saw a sandwich – but that's an inadequate term. Cecelia had obviously done things with an entire loaf of French bread.

I pulled it out, thinking that if we didn't have the outsized refrigerator that would suffice for a small restaurant there wouldn't have been room for it. I unwrapped the plastic that was around it, lifted the "lid," and found three distinct segments. Cecelia had essentially made three sandwiches in one, using various combinations of meat and vegetables. There was no baloney, since none of us like that junk, but there was plenty of a lot else.

Cecelia's loaves of French bread are longer than what you'll find at Smith's or Albertson's or Wal-Mart, but not the stretched out stuff they sell at Sam's Club. I cut the sandwich in half, closed my eyes, and using both hands spun the plate around a bit. I then reached out, grabbed a half blind, and picked it up. That was what I was going to eat. I put it back down, knowing it now, and got another plate out of the cabinet. I put my half the sandwich on that, put the plate on the counter between the kitchen and dinging room, rewrapped the other half, and stuck it back where it had come from. I walked back around the counter into the dining room and then, before I sat down, I remembered to get my book.

That was a switch – usually I only remember stuff like that after I'm already settled in and comfortable. I took a few steps, picked The Romulan Way off the coffee table, and walked back to the counter. To a Trekkie a Star Trek novel is good – to someone who values excellent writing and dislikes hackwork that merely exploits a cash cow, something like this is a prize. The book came out in 1987, the same year as Star Trek: The Next Generation, and didn't suffer from the mass production lack of quality that characterizes most of what exploded from the presses in later years.

I sat down, opened my book, and picked up the sandwich. It was difficult keeping the book open, since the spine wasn't broken, and eating the sandwich, and only having two hands. Far be it from me to question God's wisdom, but I sure wish He'd given us two pairs of hands. There are any number of things which require more than just the two hands we have.

After a bit I finished the sandwich, and found myself agreeably full. I dogeared the book – unlike Nero Wolfe, I don't have grateful clients giving me strips of gold to mark my place – and grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator. And then I put it back. I still had four bottles of Bitburger from the six pack I'd bought back in January, and I might as well have one. I wasn't planning on driving, nor doing any heavy thinking, and as long as it takes me to finish a beer I'd be as sober when I got done as I was now.

I make it a point never to drink when I need a drink. In my youth I went down the drinking road, getting falling down, vomiting, riotously drunk on regular occasions. I can't figure out what I thought I was doing, for there is no fun at all in forgetting whole weekends, puking your guts out, hangovers, stinking clothes, a girlfriend who's furious with you again because you came home staggering again, or any of the other consequences of drunkenness. And of course I'm a Christian these days, and don't get drunk – period.

But occasionally, very occasionally, I'll have a beer, or a glass of wine at our friend Letty's house. She's half Chicano and half Romanian, and wine was as much a part of her life growing up as home cooking is part of Darlia's. I was having a beer less occasionally this year, it seemed, than usual – normally I finish one six pack in a year, and it was getting into fall and I still had most of this one left.

I sat down on the sofa, my feet on the marble slab that tops our coffee table, read my book, and sipped my beer. Bitburger is German, the best kind, with real taste rather than just alcohol in colored fizzy water. I seem to remember reading, ages ago, that the Germans call beer "liquid bread," and even if they don't I can see where someone would, if it's German beer. American beer you drink for the effect. German beer you drink for the taste.

Well, I drank for the taste, and enjoyed my book. I don't think I ever want to try Romulan ale...

I was well into the book when I heard Cecelia pull into the driveway. She doesn't quite chirp the tires when she turns, but she is not a typical Albuquerque driver – she takes a turn at a speed faster than that of a crippled snail. The people around here slow down to a crawl just to turn into a driveway, but Cecelia's from Alabama and has different ideas.

I dogeared the page I was on and went to the door. I opened it up and watched as Cecelia got out of her car, an arrest-me-red Mazda that she keeps sparkling clean, locked it up, and headed for the stoop. When she saw me she smiled, her white teeth gleaming against the dark skin of her narrow face.

"How's the worker bee?" I asked.

"I truly have been laboring today, unlike the drone who awaits me. But I am not merely a worker – I am also the queen, and demand royal jelly." By then she was on the stoop, and she put her arms around me and gave me a hug and a kiss. We might have been married for 13 years, but we're as passionate about each other – and as willing to show it – as newlyweds.

I took her hand and led her inside. Since she puts things in pockets, and anyway doesn't carry around a ton of makeup, there was no purse to get in the way. She headed, naturally, straight for the kitchen, and I perched on a stool on the dining room side of the counter. "Some people may eat royal jelly," I said, "but I ain't one of 'em. I'll leave that to the larvae who are gonna become real queen bees. Now if you wanna go rob a hive..."

"The only reason I would have for robbing a hive would be the honey – a thought which, suddenly, makes me think it would be nice if we had room for a hive or two. I might enjoy being an amateur apiarist."