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.Nor could Mrs.Smither herself leave her squash doughnut supervisor post.Could Pete take care of them? Good Pete would never spring this family of strangers for weeks on his wife.They had their baby boy and only two rooms.That night Maytree drank vodka from its bottle as Deary gasped beside him in their bed.Their walkway lamps below the window yellowed the iced maple’s glaze.Deary’s breathing stopped sometimes, as always, and resumed with a snort.What had they injected him with, hummingbird feed? Had none of them ever broken a bone? How about half a lethal injection? At least in capital cases they treated the whole person.He could buy Pete and Marie a house of any size—but Pete would not accept.He still had his young pride.How could they move when she had just had a baby? He and Sooner could hoist Pete’s house to a wide flatbed…No, Sooner had gone back to Missouri for the winter, and he could hoist nothing.That was the point.He reminded himself that perhaps a billion people like him worldwide were lying awake in pain now and at their wits’ end.In Provincetown he could rent a place off-season, for Deary and him and a live-in helper or two, if Deary could stand strangers whose accents and clothes betrayed sloppy families.For what purpose had he amassed so much money if it was useless? Well, for three private nurses in eight-hour shifts, if there were any nurses.And again, if Deary would permit as witnesses strangers who would misplace everything in a twinkling, and pat her head.Reportedly Cornelius Blue and Jane lived in separate dune shacks and separate places in town; they visited.With Jane lived a bundled baby, Tandy.Cornelius’s town room! It was one room.If the old bachelor would not tend one sack of helplessness in the form of Tandy, he would not tend three.Reevadare took in strays, of which Deary had been many.Reevadare also loved throwing parties, loved being waited on herself, and talked too much.He rejected the Manor—the nursing home.Now what to hope? For he had known all day he would appeal to Lou.He knew it as he fell.If he could flex his elbows, he would hide his face.Practiced—he was at least practiced—he faced his embarrassment down.The iced maple trunk near the windows had a translucent double.He would slither back so his real wife could carry Deary from bed to bath till she died.Lou had kept his name.And she would take them.He would welcome them in her place, and he knew her spirit to be generous.Not because troubles whipped him and he had no one else to appeal to, though troubles certainly whipped him and he had no one else to appeal to, but because Lou might actually help them, pronto.And forgiveness had nothing to do with it.They were both whole people, he and Lou.Whole old people.At their age forgiveness could be child’s play if you knew the ropes, and so could be the nod that accepted forgiveness of course and moved on.Young, he would have thought any end, even dying, beat being forgiven, let alone by a woman, and beat asking for help, too, let alone asking the wife he left for help.Now he and Lou—if Lou was like Pete, whom he more wronged—could meet as equals.His asking would honor her goodness.His willingness to ask was part of what he now knew best: to think well of those you have wronged, let alone those who have wronged you.He hoped Lou’s thinking had brought her there, too.He really hoped.Just till Deary died.Mrs.Smither would drive Deary and him to Provincetown tomorrow in her car.If Lou refused them, she would at least help him think what else to try.Would he and Lou even recognize each other? She kept inviting them to visit—but she was kidding herself.No, no possible course could be worse.They would leave early.He sprang to life.He fell asleep.IT WAS AFTER TWO o’clock the next day that they hazarded the Orleans rotary.He sat by Mrs.Smither while Deary dozed and jerked in back.The Cape land was flimsy; it lacked stones.If Nausets discovered a glacial erratic, they wore paths to it to grind corn; later surveyors reckoned by it.Maytree saw gaudy roadside shops clear to Eastham.A gas-station map showed that the green-tinted National Seashore takings, which they had all fought, had saved the lower Cape.They passed dead Pilgrim Lake [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]