'Good. I will too. Another waffle?'
'No, thanks.' The whole conversation was turning surreal. Suddenly he wanted to be out and gone. Suddenly the trip felt very necessary and very attractive. The idea of getting away from the whole mess.
Putting miles between him and it. He felt a sudden jab of anticipation. In his mind he could see the Delta jet cutting through the unraveling fog and into the blue.
'Can I have a waffle?'
They both looked around, startled. It was Tad, standing in the hallway in his yellow footy pajamas, his stuffed coyote grasped by one ear, his red blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He looked like a small, sleepy Indian.
'I guess I could rustle one up,' Donna said, surprised. Tad was not a notably early riser.
'Was it the phone, Tad?' Vic asked.
Tad shook his head. 'I made myself wake up early so I could say good-bye to you, Daddy. Do you really have to go?'
'It's just for a while.'
'It's too long,' Tad said blackly. 'I put a circle around the day you're coming home on my calendar. Mom showed me which one. I'm going to mark off every day, and she said she'd tell me the Monster Words every night.'
'Well, that's okay, isn't it?'
'Will you can?'
'Every other night,' Vic said.
'Every night,' Tad insisted. He crawled up into Vic's lap and set his coyote next to Vic's plate. Tad began to crunch up a piece of toast.
'Every night, Daddy.'
'I can't every night,' Vic said, thinking of the backbreaking schedule Roger had laid out on Friday, before the letter had come.
'Why not?'
'Because -'
'Because your Uncle Roger is a hard taskmaster,' Donna said, Puffing Tad's waffle On the table. 'Come on over here and eat.
Bring your coyote. Daddy will call us tomorrow night from Boston and tell us everything that happened to him.'
Tad took his place at the end of the table. He had a large plastic placemat that said TAD. 'Will you bring me a toy?'
'Maybe. If you're good. And maybe I'll call tonight so you'll know I got to Boston in one piece.'
'Good deal.' Vic watched, fascinated, as Tad poured a small ocean of syrup over his waffle. 'What kind of toy?'
'We'll see,' Vic said. He watched Tad eat his waffle. It suddenly occurred to him that Tad liked eggs. Scrambled, friend, poached, or hard-boiled, Tad gobbled them up. 'Tad?'
'What, Daddy?'
'If you wanted people to buy eggs, what would you tell them?'
Tad considered. 'I'd tell em eggs taste good,' he said.
Vic met his wife's eyes again, and they had a second moment like the one that had occurred when the phone rang. This time they laughed telepathically.
Their good-byes were light. Only Tad, with his imperfect grasp of how short the future really was, cried.
'You'll think about it?' Donna asked him again as he climbed into the jag.
'Yes.'
But driving into Bridgton to get Roger, what he thought about were those two moments of near-perfect communication. Two in one morning, not bad. All it took was eight or nine years together, roughly a quarter of all the years so far spent on the face of the earth. He got thinking about how ridiculous the whole concept of human communication was - what monstrous, absurd overkill was necessary to achieve even a little. When you'd invested the time and made it good, you had to he careful. Yes, he'd think about it. It had been good between them, and although some of the channels were now closed, filled with God knew how much muck (and some of that muck might still be squirming), plenty of the others seemed open and in reasonably good working order.
There had to be some careful thought - but perhaps not too much at once. Things had a way of magnifying themselves.
He turned the radio up and began to think about the poor old Sharp Cereal Professor.
Joe Camber pulled up in front of the Greyhound terminal in Portland at ten minutes to eight. The fog had burned off and the digital clock atop the Casco Bank and Trust read 73 degrees already.
He drove with his hat planted squarely on his head, ready to be angry at anyone who pulled out or cut in front of him. He hated to drive in the city. When he and Gary got to Boston he intended to park the car and leave it until they were ready to come home. They could take the subways if they could puzzle them out, walk if they couldn't.
Charity was dressed in her best pants suit - it was a quiet green -
and a white cotton blouse with a ruffle at the neck. She was wearing earrings, and this had filled Brett with a mild sense of amazement. He couldn't remember his mother wearing earrings at all, except to church.
Brett had caught her alone when she went upstairs to dress after getting Dad his breakfast oatmeal. Joe had been mostly silent, grunting answers to questions in monosyllables, then shutting off conversation entirely by tuning the radio to WCSH for the ball scores. They were both afraid that the silence might presage a ruinous outburst and a sudden change of mind on their trip.
Charity had the slacks of her pants suit on and was slipping into her blouse. Brett noted she was wearing a peach-colored bra, and that had also amazed him. He hadn't known his mother had underclothes in any color other than white.
