Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [99]
When I returned to the room, they were still sitting by the light. Slowly and sincerely I spoke: “Just one more thing while I’m here. You had mentioned something about feeling you’d been a bad example. I wanted to say that if there was any guilt about that, I forgive you.”
“Oh, I—”
“And I know that I may have been irritating and absentminded and probably done other things wrong. Will you forgive me?”
“Of course. It was me I was mainly upset with.” As Edward talked and protested, then, as though from hidden recesses in the room, something like honey began to flow thickly, filling the cavities with sweetness. It enfolded us all in a soft embrace. The room was so still, we heard the sound of our own breathing.
Now Grace was talking: “You know how a person can coast along and think ‘Stress never bothers me,’ and then it comes along and you go like—” She made a face like a grizzly bear’s and held her hands like claws.
I nodded, adding, “And you had to work with Bill and me at the same time. That must have been like having to work with Laurel and Hardy.”
“I think”—Grace was at her best now—“you’ve both demonstrated good Christian behavior tonight.”
Edward now was lying across the couch in an ungainly sprawl, hat off, his hair flaring in all directions like the corona of the sun, smirking and feeling deep in his pocket. It looked like there was a live squirrel in there. “I hate it,” he said, “when there’s a hole in my pocket. It makes be feel so ulglglgh. I can’t seem to find it.”
Whatever had slipped out, I hoped it wasn’t anything he’d miss.
We saw Bill one last time. He was in one of his punk-rock getups, speeding by in a beat-up Oldsmobile, his hair long and flying.
Twenty-One
Closing Time
October winds ushered in a swirl of change, and everywhere brilliant orange and yellow leaves descended to the earth. Our second batch of crops came in more plentifully than the first, and the profits included the proceeds of Howie’s peppers. I had prepared the ground this year with my own horse and borrowed equipment from the Millers.
And let me not forget our other little project. With constant care and a rich liquid diet, he now weighed in on the heavier side of a pumpkin, this labor of mutual love, Hans.
With autumn, the time of our own decision had come. We were now three, and the month we had entered was the eighteenth. The results of our tests were in, and they were favorable. All except one.
Mary had been accompanying me ever less frequently on the buggy trips. Something about them seemed to bother her. It started as watery eyes and a runny nose. From there it developed into full-scale sneezing episodes whenever she got on the wagon seat. Was she allergic to something? The last time she remembered symptoms anything like these was as a child, when the wind blew into her bedroom window from the general direction of a neighboring farm. It was a horse farm.
Mary had always wondered whether she was allergic to horses. Now there was no doubt.
It was hard to believe that something so small could have effects so big. Horse dander. Mary could not abide the emissions of the prevailing mode of transportation here. We could see no easy way around the problem. Mary was allergic to her best hope for mobility in the community.
We sat in the living room weighing the revelation, measuring it against other considerations, striving for dispassionate analysis. The scales seemed to tip back and forth ever so slightly, but always, inexorably, tilting to the same conclusion. If horse dander had been the only issue, perhaps we might have tried to make some creative adjustment. But we had long been hovering in the balance, and other considerations also added their weight. There were still certain personal requirements we could not meet here. The irony was that they turned out to be mostly mine, not Mary’s. My original reason for coming was to prove a point, not to stake a claim. I was restless with the desire