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Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 169 из 425” Mattie looked so much like crying that I pickedher hand up again and kissed the back of it. “I feel like a dope.”
“You’re not a dope,” I said. I gave her hand another kiss, then drove away. And that was my date, the first one in four years.
Driving home I thdught of an old saying about how one person can never truly know another. It’s easy to give that idea lip service, but it’s a jolt—as horrible and unexpected as severe air turbulence on a previously calm airline flight—to discover it’s a literal fact in one’s own life. I kept remembering our visit to a fertility doc after we’d been trying to make a baby for almost two years with no success. The doctor had told us I had a low sperm count—not disastrously low, but down enough to account for Jo’s failure to conceive. “If you want a kid, you’ll likely have one without any special help,” the doc had said.
“Both the odds and time are still on your side. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen four years from now. Will you ever fill the house with babies? Probably not. But you might have two, and you’ll almost certainly have one if you keep doing the thing that makes them.” She had grinned. “Remember, the pleasure is in the journey.” There had been a lot of pleasure, all right, many ringings of Bunter’s bell, but there had been no baby. Then Johanna had died running across a shopping-center parking lot on a hot day, and one of the items in her bag had been a Norco Home Pregnancy Test which she had not told me she had intended to buy. No more than she’d told me she had bought a couple of plastic owls to keep the crows from shitting on the lakeside deck. What else hadn’t she told me? “Stop,” I muttered. “For Christ’s sake stop thinking about it.” But I couldn’t.
When I got back to Sara, the fruit and vegetable magnets on the refrigerator were in a circle again. Three letters had been clustered in the middle: g d I moved the 0 up to where I thought it belonged, making “god” or maybe an abridged version of “good.” Which meant exactly what? “I could speculate about that, but I prefer not to,” I told the empty house. I looked at Bunter the moose, willing the bell around his moth-eaten neck to ring. When it didn’t, I opened my two new Magnabet packages and stuck the letters on the fridge door, spreading them out. Then I went down to the north wing, undressed, and brushed my teeth. As I bared my fangs for the mirror in a sudsy cartoon scowl, I considered calling Ward Hankins again tomorrow morning. I could tell him that my search for the elusive plastic owls had progressed from November of 1993 to July of 1994.
“You’re not a dope,” I said. I gave her hand another kiss, then drove away. And that was my date, the first one in four years.
Driving home I thdught of an old saying about how one person can never truly know another. It’s easy to give that idea lip service, but it’s a jolt—as horrible and unexpected as severe air turbulence on a previously calm airline flight—to discover it’s a literal fact in one’s own life. I kept remembering our visit to a fertility doc after we’d been trying to make a baby for almost two years with no success. The doctor had told us I had a low sperm count—not disastrously low, but down enough to account for Jo’s failure to conceive. “If you want a kid, you’ll likely have one without any special help,” the doc had said.
“Both the odds and time are still on your side. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen four years from now. Will you ever fill the house with babies? Probably not. But you might have two, and you’ll almost certainly have one if you keep doing the thing that makes them.” She had grinned. “Remember, the pleasure is in the journey.” There had been a lot of pleasure, all right, many ringings of Bunter’s bell, but there had been no baby. Then Johanna had died running across a shopping-center parking lot on a hot day, and one of the items in her bag had been a Norco Home Pregnancy Test which she had not told me she had intended to buy. No more than she’d told me she had bought a couple of plastic owls to keep the crows from shitting on the lakeside deck. What else hadn’t she told me? “Stop,” I muttered. “For Christ’s sake stop thinking about it.” But I couldn’t.
When I got back to Sara, the fruit and vegetable magnets on the refrigerator were in a circle again. Three letters had been clustered in the middle: g d I moved the 0 up to where I thought it belonged, making “god” or maybe an abridged version of “good.” Which meant exactly what? “I could speculate about that, but I prefer not to,” I told the empty house. I looked at Bunter the moose, willing the bell around his moth-eaten neck to ring. When it didn’t, I opened my two new Magnabet packages and stuck the letters on the fridge door, spreading them out. Then I went down to the north wing, undressed, and brushed my teeth. As I bared my fangs for the mirror in a sudsy cartoon scowl, I considered calling Ward Hankins again tomorrow morning. I could tell him that my search for the elusive plastic owls had progressed from November of 1993 to July of 1994.