On a cold morning, nine days before Thanksgiving, on the far northern coast of California, nineteen-year-old Tober Quincy stands behind the checkout counter in a big store known as Good Used Stuff, two miles inland from the mouth of the Eel River.
Tall and handsome, with long brown hair in a ponytail, Tober is friendly and thoughtful with a wry sense of humor inherited from his mother and an endearing curiosity about everyone he meets. He has been employed at Good Used Stuff for three years and works thirty hours a week as both a clerk in the store and as a maker of tables and chairs in the Good Used Stuff woodshop. He likes his job, though more and more lately he’s been thinking about shifting entirely to freelance work as explicated on his most recent business card.
October “Tober” Quincy
Composer * Violinist * Carpenter * Gardener
Fruit Tree Pruner * Collector of Special Stones
Reasonable Rates * Inquiries Welcome
Until three months ago, Tober lived with his brother Augie, who is younger than Tober by a year, and their mother Sharon, who is forty-two, in a farmhouse at the end of Snake Creek Road, the nearest town Fortuna, ten miles away. Then in August, Augie moved to Portland, Oregon to attend graduate school in Clinical Psychology at Oregon Health and Science University; and when Tober and Sharon returned from helping Augie get settled in Portland, Sharon decided to begin the process of adopting two young sisters, Amelia, five, and Consuela, four, something she’d been considering since attending adoption workshops in June.
Tober is excited about Amelia and Consuela joining the family and he’s looking forward to helping them adjust to their new lives on Snake Creek Road, though the addition of two little girls to the household means he will be vacating his bedroom—the only bedroom he’s ever known—and moving into the low-ceilinged attic, which is not an ideal bedroom for a person six-foot-three.
Thus he is planning to build another house on their ten acres, though he isn’t sure how big a house to build. What if Augie decides to come home after his three or four years in Portland, or sooner if he changes his mind about becoming a psychotherapist? What if he, Tober, wants to get married and have children? Should he build a cottage that can be expanded into a larger house, or two separate expandable cottages, one for him and one for Augie?
As if this weren’t enough upheaval for one brief stretch of a person’s life, Tober is now six months into his first relationship involving sex. His girlfriend Annie is twenty-three and lives in Fortuna where she is a waitress at Double D Steakhouse and shares an apartment with a hairdresser named Tiffany. In his six months as Annie’s official boyfriend, Tober’s mad love for her has inspired him to write fourteen love songs, two sonatas for piano and violin, one sonata for violin and guitar, and dozens of love sonnets.
Annie, who is always hip to the very latest celebrity gossip and spends hours every day perusing Fashion magazines and Fashion web sites, is forever telling Tober how much she loves him and wants to marry him and have at least two children with him. When she’s not working at Double D, Annie likes to smoke pot, watch television, text and talk on her phone, go barhopping with Tiffany, and have sex with Tober.
When Tober is with Annie, he can’t take his eyes off her, and when they’re apart he can’t stop thinking about her.
But wait, there’s more. Not only has Sharon decided to adopt two children, but six weeks ago she abruptly ended her two-year relationship with Maybe, the owner of Good Used Stuff, which has made the last several weeks at work for Tober quite the emotional challenge.
And so…
∆
On this cold November morning, nine days before Thanksgiving, Tober is standing behind the checkout counter near the front door of Good Used Stuff, re-reading a long handwritten letter he got yesterday from Augie asking him to come to Portland and visit for a few days, after which they will return home together for Thanksgiving.
Now a familiar engine sound of a car in need of a new muffler causes Tober to look up from Augie’s letter and gaze expectantly at the front door until it opens and Annie hurries in accompanied by a blast of frigid air.
Tall and buxom with golden blonde hair, her mother Swedish, her father a big guy from Montana, Annie is wearing blood-red cowboy boots, hip-hugging blue jeans, and a red jacket over a tightly-fitting pink T-shirt with the words EUREKA writ in large red caps on the gossamer fabric directly over Annie’s breasts.
“Hey darlin’” says Tober, coming out from behind the counter to embrace his beloved.
“Hey,” says Annie, holding up her hand to stop him from coming any closer.
“What’s going on?” asks Tober, obeying her signal.
“I’m…” She looks away from him. “I can’t do this anymore. You and me.”
“Can’t do what?” he asks, bewildered.
“Be with you anymore,” she says, still looking away. “I’ve been sleeping with other guys for the last couple months.” She shrugs. “Maybe a few months. I didn’t want to. I mean… I wanted to, but I didn’t want to want to.” She sighs. “I tried not to, but I couldn’t stop myself.” Now she looks at him. “I really wanted to make it work with you, but we’re just too different.” She grimaces. “You’re like from another planet, Tober. Where they don’t have phones or televisions or modern anything. I mean… no offense, but most of the time I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. It’s like you’re from King Arthur or something.” She looks away again. “But I’m really gonna miss fucking you. Sex with you was like way the best I’ve ever had.” She looks at him again. “I’m not just saying that. You’re amazing. But what I’m not gonna miss is feeling like an idiot for not knowing what a sonnet is or a sonata or physics or history or… whatever.” She glares at him. “I need to feel good about myself. Good about who I am and what I like to do. Which is not what you like to do. Except the sex. But it just wasn’t enough anymore, you know, to like… bridge the gap. So now I’m gonna go. Have a good life.”
∆
Never in his nineteen years has Tober gone into shock, but now he does; and the next thing he knows, he finds himself sitting in an armchair by the woodstove in the northwest corner of the enormous store, having no memory of traversing the forty feet from the checkout counter to the stove through a maze of furniture and tools and statuary. Nor does he remember sitting down or how much time has passed since Annie came and went.
He is roused from his torpor by Maybe coming in the back door and tromping to the stove to get warm. Maybe is fifty-years-old, not quite six-feet-tall, with longish brown hair and a lopsided mustache. He is wearing a purple wool cap pulled down over his ears, a puffy orange jacket, baggy brown trousers, and black boots, his face creased with worry.
Tober very much wants to tell Maybe how strange he feels and how Annie’s coming and going was so much like a dream he wonders if it was a dream, but before he can say anything, he realizes Maybe is speaking to him.
“…so I think it would be better if you didn’t work here anymore until I get over what your mother did to me, if I ever can. I hate to do this, Tober, but every time I see you all I can think about is her saying she doesn’t want to be with me anymore.”
“Wait,” says Tober, frowning at Maybe. “Are you firing me?”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” says Maybe, shrugging. “I’m asking you to quit so I won’t have to fire you. I mean… you know I like you. You’re one of the finest people I know. And you’re a wizard at selling things and making things and finding stones and… but I thought your mother and I were gonna get married, and now she won’t even talk to me. And I need to stop thinking about her. It’s killing me.” He grimaces. “I’m sorry, Tober. I just… I need to recover.”
“Do you still want to buy stones from me?” asks Tober, sadly amused that he would ask Maybe about stones at a time like this.
“Oh definitely,” says Maybe, nodding. “But have Titus bring them in, okay? So I don’t have to see you and remember how one day we were planning the wedding and the next day she wouldn’t talk to me. Like I was nothing to her.”
“That isn’t how it was, Maybe.” Tober gets up from the chair. “You guys talked for days and days after she told you. And you called her every night for two weeks, and you came over when she was giving lessons and refused to leave, refused to let her do her work. You need to be honest with yourself about this, Maybe, or you’re never gonna get over her.”
“But she’d never tell me why,” says Maybe, crying. “She just kept saying it wasn’t what she wanted, but she wouldn’t say what she did want, so there was nothing I could do, nothing I could change so she would want me again.”
∆
Titus Troutcatcher, Tober’s mentor and friend and chosen grandfather, is a Wailaki healer and counselor. Titus is eighty-five and lives with his wife Tina in a little house in the forest about a mile inland from Good Used Stuff. He doesn’t charge for his services as a healer and counselor, yet he makes a decent living because the people who come to him show their gratitude with money and gifts.
Tober drives his white electric pickup truck through a light rain to Titus’s place and finds Titus standing at the bottom of the front stairs, looking gigantic in his long gray coat as he throws a tennis ball for Spider and Feather, his longhaired Chihuahuas.
“I thought I might see you today,” says Titus, greeting Tober with a strong embrace, his voice pleasantly gruff. “Thought I heard you calling me about an hour ago. What was going on?”
“Well,” says Tober, already feeling better now that he’s with Titus, “Annie came to the store and told me she’d been sleeping with other men and didn’t want to be with me anymore, and then Maybe asked me to quit because every time he sees me, he thinks of my mom. Then he gave me a thousand dollars severance pay. And now I’m here.”
“Want some chili?” asks Titus, nodding encouragingly. “Made with fresh venison. Horace Waterfall shot that young doe couple days ago. You know the one. She kept jumping his deer fence and eating those late yellow apples. Horace gave us a rear haunch. Tender. I think all those apples she ate made her extra sweet. Tina made her chili yesterday. Pretty spicy, but delicious. Come on in. Get warm.”
They climb the four steps to the front porch of the little pink house and go inside, the dogs rushing in ahead of them. They take off their coats and Titus puts a log of pine and a log of oak on the spluttering fire, and the flames grow large.
While Titus heats the chili and makes toast and coffee, Tober squats by the fire and gazes at the glowing embers and wonders why today of all days he lost both his lover and his job.
“Tina’s in Fortuna,” says Titus, stirring the pot of chili. “At Teresa’s. Might spend the night over there. Her night vision isn’t so good anymore. She shouldn’t drive after dusk. Her great grandson Lawrence, you remember him. He’s six now. Has that big gap between his two front teeth. Red hair. He’s in a school play today about vegetables. He’s a carrot. Type casting. I was gonna go but I woke up this morning feeling like I should stick around here.”
“I’m glad you did,” says Tober, smiling.
“So… Maybe let you go,” says Titus, nodding. “You were ready to stop working there anyway, weren’t you? That was a good first job away from home for you, but now you can go freelance like you’ve been wanting to. It’s a sad situation, him pining for your mother, but now you’re free. Sometimes we need a push to leave the nest, and he gave you one.”
“True,” says Tober, adding another log to the fire. “It was time for me to go.”
A silence falls, both of them thinking about Annie and what they might say.
“So…” says Titus, tasting the chili. “Annie. Beautiful woman. Every time I see her I think of Vikings. You know? A Viking princess. Only without the helmet with the horns. Did you want to marry her?”
“I thought I did,” says Tober, nodding. “But I think that was only because she kept saying how much she wanted to marry me and have children and… I wanted to make her happy. But the truth is, I never really could imagine being married to her, sharing a house and doing chores together and taking care of kids and animals and… never could imagine that.”
“What did you do together when you weren’t having sex?” Titus fills two big bowls with chili and carries the bowls to the kitchen table. “If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I don’t mind,” says Tober, who has never had any secrets from Titus in the twelve years they’ve known each other. “We’d go to the beach when it was sunny and she’d sunbathe and use her phone while I searched for stones and… she liked to go out for breakfast, and sometimes we’d go to pubs and… but I guess we mostly just hung out and… you know… enjoyed being with each other.”
“What did you do when you just hung out?” Titus takes the toast out of the toaster oven. “When you weren’t having sex?”
“Well… she would watch television and send messages to her friends on her phone and read Fashion magazines and smoke pot. She smoked pot pretty much all the time when she wasn’t working. Said it relaxed her.”
“Did you smoke with her?” asks Titus, carrying the toast and butter to the table.
“A few times,” says Tober, nodding. “But it’s too powerful for me. Even just one little puff and I can barely move because I’m so overwhelmed by the enormity and complexity of even the smallest thing.”
“Yeah, marijuana is a powerful teacher,” says Titus, nodding. “I don’t recommend it for recreational use.”
“I wouldn’t either,” says Tober, shaking his head. “But she smokes all the time and it hardly seems to effect her.”
“The more a person uses,” says Titus, filling the dogs’ bowl with kibble, “the more they need to use to get what they’re after. Euphoria.” He gets two big mugs out of the cupboard. “So what did you do while she was smoking pot and watching television?”
“I’d read and write letters and compose and draw and… like that.” Tober frowns. “Are you implying we weren’t a good match?”
“No, I was just asking,” says Titus, filling the mugs with coffee and bringing them to the table. “Let’s eat.”
They sit opposite each other and share a moment of silence.
“Did Annie teach you how to please her?” Titus sips his coffee. “Sexually?”
“Yes,” says Tober, blushing. “And though I have no one else to compare her to, I dare say she was a very good teacher.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” Titus chews thoughtfully on a chunk of venison and thinks of the two women who taught him the ways of love when he was Tober’s age. “Did she show you more than one way to please her?”
“More ways than I ever imagined.” says Tober, laughing.
“Did you like pleasing her?” asks Titus, nodding hopefully.
“More than anything,” says Tober, his heart aching.
“That’s how it was for me, too, when I was nineteen.” Titus smiles. “Nothing else could quite compare.”
“And that changed when you got older?” asks Tober, his eyes full of tears.
“Yeah,” says Titus, nodding. “When I was in my thirties, thirty-three or thereabouts, after my first child was born, that’s when singing and dancing and healing people and teaching the children about the natural world became as satisfying as sex, but in a different way. A spiritual way.”
“I guess I sometimes feel just as satisfied when I’m playing my violin or singing or walking in the woods.” Tober smiles through his tears. “But I’ve never felt so wildly good, crazy good, as when I made love with Annie.”
“Yeah, crazy good,” says Titus, laughing. “That’s a perfect thing to call it. Wildly good. Crazy good. So… was it ever wildly good for both of you at the same time?”
“Yes,” says Tober, his tears flowing.
“Which means her body and her physical energy were good matches for your body and your physical energy.” Titus smiles reassuringly. “And just think, October. The next time you make love with a woman, you’ll be able to please her because of all the wildly good things you learned from Annie.”
“Yeah,” says Tober, using a napkin to daub his tears. “Though I’d rather keep pleasing her.”
“Of course you would,” says Titus, nodding. “I didn’t mean it isn’t sad she doesn’t want to be with you anymore. I just wanted to remind you that you learned valuable things from her, things most men never learn. And in my experience, men who don’t know how to please women sexually don’t make very good husbands.”
“But why did she have to sleep with other men?” asks Tober, closing his eyes. “Why would she say I was her one and only and she didn’t want anybody else but me, and she wanted to marry me and have children with me if it wasn’t true? Why would she lie to me?”
“She slept with other men because it excited her to deceive you.” Titus looks out the window as the rain turns to hail. “Some people need to feel they’re doing something forbidden to get excited. And there are many men and women who find it thrilling to deceive their wives and husbands. I’ve known men who can only get aroused when they have two women in their bed, and I’ve known women who only get excited when they have two men.”
“At the same time?” asks Tober, making a horrified face.
“Oh yeah,” says Titus, nodding. “Some people only get excited when their partner ties them up, so they’re helpless. Can you imagine? Being excited by feeling helpless? Excited that someone has that kind of power over you and might hurt you? It’s true, October. Some people only get aroused when their partner says nasty things to them, and some people only get aroused if the person they’re with is a stranger.”
“Why?” asks Tober, gaping at Titus.
“Because everyone is different,” says Titus, tapping the table four times. “You and I might think everyone should want what we want, and behave as we like to behave, but they don’t. Each person is unique and became who they are through the particular experiences of their lives and the things they learned from others.”
“But why did she keep saying I was her one and only?” asks Tober, his heart aching. “Why did she keep saying she only wanted me?”
“I think she kept saying that so her deception would be even more of a betrayal.” Titus has another sip of coffee. “Betraying you was exciting for her. I’m sorry to tell you this, but that’s how some people are.”
“But why? Why would she want to betray me when all I ever did was love her?”
“Perhaps she was jealous of you. Jealous of your talent and your confidence and happiness, jealous that you were a man and have power and freedom she doesn’t feel she has.” Titus crosses his hands over his heart. “But she loved you, October. As best she could. Only her love wasn’t strong enough to overcome her addictions and the ways of behaving she learned from her mother. But never forget that when you made love with her, she was giving you a gift and you were giving her a gift. And you are both stronger now for the gifts you gave each other.”
∆
Tober gets home at three that afternoon, a hard rain falling, and finds his mother carrying things out of his bedroom and piling them in the living room.
“You’re home early,” she says, surprised to see him. “Everything okay?”
Sharon is five-foot-three and slender with high cheekbones and brilliant blue eyes and lustrous brown hair that falls to her shoulders. She is reflexively friendly, but reticent about being physically affectionate, even with her close friends and her sons, which is something she would like to change about herself.
“Maybe asked me to quit today, so I did,” says Tober, looking over the things his mother has brought out of his bedroom—clothes and books and blankets and a guitar case and two wooden boxes full of ocean-polished stones. “And right before that, Annie told me she doesn’t want to be with me anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Tobe,” says Sharon, going to him. “I thought this might happen.”
“Which?” asks Tober, laughing. “That he’d fire me or she’d break up with me?”
“Both,” she says, giving him the briefest of hugs. “I’m surprised he kept you on as long as he did.”
“Why did you think Annie would break up with me?” He gazes at her expectantly. “Irreconcilable differences?”
“Oh Jean said she saw Annie with some guy in a pub in Eureka a couple weeks ago.” Sharon winces. “I was going to tell you, but then I thought it wasn’t any of my business, so I didn’t.”
“I wonder why you didn’t think it was any of your business,” says Tober, looking at the piles of his things again. “And why are you moving everything out of my room? I thought we weren’t getting the girls until January. Isn’t that what you said you wanted to do? Wait until Augie went back to Portland after Christmas?”
“I did say that,” she says, collapsing on the sofa, “but I changed my mind. The place they’re staying is so crowded and understaffed and… I want them here now.” She starts to cry. “They need to be here, Tobe.”
“Let’s go get them right now,” he says, sitting beside her. “I’ll finish emptying the room when we get back.”
“We can’t get them until tomorrow morning,” she says, weeping. “At ten.”
He wraps his arms around her and holds her as she cries, and when she tries to pull away as she always does after a few seconds, he holds her a while longer and she finally relaxes and enjoys his embrace.
∆
When Sharon and Tober finish dusting and vacuuming and mopping the now empty bedroom, they have supper and make their plans for tomorrow.
“We’ll buy two new single mattresses on the way there,” says Sharon, having a glass of red wine with her spaghetti. “And we can put their beds side-by-side if they want to sleep together, or apart if they don’t.”
“We should take both trucks,” says Tober, visualizing the trek to Eureka. “That way I can stop and get lumber on the way back and the girls can both sit with you without one of them having to sit on my lap. Since they don’t know me very well, we don’t want to freak them out.”
“Good idea,” says Sharon, starting to cry again. “Thank you so much for helping me with this, Tobe.”
“I’m not just helping you,” he says, shaking his head. “They’re joining the family. They’re not replacing me and Augie. Are they?”
“No, of course not,” say Sharon, sniffling back her tears. “They’re joining us.”
“And in a few days, when the dust settles, I’ll zoom up to Portland and get Augie.” Tober smiles at the thought of seeing his brother. “Bring him home for Turkey Day.”
“He’s dying to come home,” she says, relieved to have cried. “I’m sorry about your job, Tobe. I just couldn’t pretend anymore that Maybe was going to turn into someone else.”
“I hope you didn’t stay involved with him just so I wouldn’t lose my job.” Tober considers this possibility. “Did you?”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I stayed involved with him because I wanted to see if I could outlast my tendency to end relationships after a couple years, because that’s what I do, or whether he and I really were incompatible in too many important ways.”
“I wonder if a musician can ever be compatible with a non-musician,” says Tober, thinking of Annie who played no instrument and seemed ambivalent about the songs and music he wrote for her.
“I don’t know,” says Sharon, swirling her wine. “I’ve never been involved with a musician, but now that you mention it, that was a big disconnect with Maybe, though certainly not the biggest.”
“What was the biggest?” asks Tober, wondering if it had something to do with sex. “If you don’t mind telling me.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she says, finishing her wine. “Would you pour me a little more, please?”
“But of course Madame,” he says, filling her glass
“I’m not sure I can put this into words, but…” She muses for a moment. “Well the girls, for instance. When I told him I was thinking of adopting a child or two, he gave me this skeptical look and said, ‘Why would you want to do something like that?’ The implication being that there was something suspect about my wanting more children, that they would somehow be a negation of him, a diminishing of his importance in my life. And I realized that his notion of a relationship was one in which your mate should always be the primary focus, not the family, not the community, but only your mate. Whereas my notion of a relationship is an alliance within a larger family and community.”
∆
After supper, Tober carries the vacuum cleaner up the narrow stairway to the attic to get the space ready for his things; and when he bumps his head on the low ceiling four times in the first five minutes he’s up there, he turns off the vacuum cleaner and comes down the stairs into the kitchen where Sharon is sitting at the counter having a cup of tea and making a shopping list for tomorrow.
“I’m not gonna live up there, Mom,” he says, taking a sip of her tea. “I can’t stand up straight without bashing my head. I’m gonna call the Bernsteins and see if I can sleep down there until I figure out where next to lay my head.”
“Take my bedroom,” says Sharon, anguished about dislocating Tober, especially with everything else he’s going through. “I’ll sleep in the attic.”
“No, you need to be near the girls,” he says, picking up the phone. “And as you may recall, the first time you floated the idea of adopting a child or two, George and Lisa both said I could stay at their place if it got too crazy up here. Besides, they’re hardly ever there now that Cecily and Felix have moved to LA and San Luis Obispo.”
He punches the number of their closest neighbors—the Bernsteins having built their house on Snake Creek Road twenty-two years ago, three years before Sharon moved into the farmhouse when she was seven months pregnant with Tober.
Cecily, George and Lisa’s daughter, is a year older than Tober and was his childhood pal and first crush. She lives in Los Angeles now, pursuing a career as an actress. Felix, George and Lisa’s son, is Augie’s age and matriculated at Cal Poly a year ago.
George, fifty-seven, an investment broker turned artisan furniture maker, answers his phone on the second ring. “Hello?”
“Hey, George, it’s Tober. Got a minute?”
“Yeah, yeah. What’s going on?” George grew up in Los Angeles, the child of Chicago Jews.
“The big news up here is we’re picking up Amelia and Consuela tomorrow morning and they’ll be taking over my bedroom, so I was wondering if…”
“Yes,” says George, excitedly. “Move down here. We’d love it. We’ve got three empty bedrooms and Lisa’s gone half the time now at the beck and call of her royal highness, who, as you know, has been on the verge of stardom for six years. And counting. Be that as it may, I’d love for you to live here. Come on down.”
“Thank you, George,” says Tober, gratefully. “I’m gonna sleep in our living room for the next couple nights until the girls get settled, and then I’m driving to Portland to get Augie for Thanksgiving, and he and I may both crash at your place, if that’s okay.”
“Absolutely,” says George, ecstatically. “Can you hear Lisa shouting hurray? We’re leaving for San Luis and LA next week and we’ll be gone all through December and into New Year’s, so… you know how to get here.”
∆
Sharon gets home with Amelia and Consuela at noon the next day, and Tober arrives an hour later with the new mattresses and lumber for building platforms for the mattresses, the platforms to have drawers underneath for the girls’ clothes and toys and extra blankets and whatnot.
Amelia, five, the older of the two sisters, is shorter and stockier than four-year-old Consuela, who is quite tall for her age and very slender. They both have shoulder-length black hair and big brown eyes. The people at the adoption agency believe the girls’ mother, a prostitute who went by the name of Candy, was part Latina, part Anglo. Amelia’s father was Mexican and Consuela’s father was African American. The girls have been in foster care since their mother died when Amelia was four and Consuela was three. The whereabouts of the fathers is unknown.
Tober enters the house and finds Consuela and Amelia and Sharon sitting at the kitchen table having blackberry smoothies and bowls of rice and vegetables. Both girls are wearing dark blue sweatshirts and gray pants and brown shoes, and both are chattering away in Spanish with Sharon, who is fluent in that language.
When the girls see Tober, they fall silent and look down, wary of making eye contact with him.
Sharon gets up from the table, takes Tober’s hand, looks at the girls and says in Spanish, “Amelia? Consuela? You’ve met my son Tober. He’s your brother now. He’s a very nice person and he speaks some Spanish, but you must help him learn more Spanish words and he will help you learn more English words.”
“Hola Amelia,” says Tober, smiling at the little girls. “Hola Consuela. Welcome home.”
“Gracias,” says Amelia, taking a peek at Tober.
“Hola,” whispers Consuela, still not looking at him. “Hermano.”
∆
The girls take an immediate liking to the big farm dog Igor, a sixty-pound Black Lab Australian Shepherd mix, and Igor seems delighted with them. Consuela especially loves the dog and asks Sharon if she may give him some food. Sharon explains that they feed Igor in the morning and late afternoon, but not in between, and they never feed him from the table during breakfast or lunch or dinner.
Consuela ponders this information and looks into Igor’s eyes. “When it is time for you to eat,” she says, petting him, “I will feed you.”
∆
Having located a cache of Augie and Tober’s childhood jackets, and confident Amelia and Consuela are dressed warmly enough for the bitter cold, Sharon and Tober and Igor give the girls a tour of the immediate vicinity of the farmhouse—the dormant vegetable garden, the orchard, the old barn, the woodshed, and the chicken coop wherein Amelia finds one egg and Consuela finds two.
∆
In the late afternoon, after Amelia and Consuela have had a nap on their new mattresses, George and Lisa come up the hill to meet the newest members of the Quincy family. Lisa presents the girls with two big bags full of clothing—dresses and shirts and coats and pants that Cecily wore when she was four and five and six.
When Sharon explains to the girls that these clothes are theirs to keep, they take turns choosing an article of clothing and solemnly carrying it into their bedroom where Consuela puts her choices on one of the mattresses and Amelia puts hers on the other. The first thing Amelia chose was a shimmery red skirt, Consuela’s first choice a black long-sleeved T-shirt.
When Tober tells George about his plan to build platforms for the beds with drawers under the platforms, George insists Tober avail himself of George’s state-of-the-art woodshop.
And when Tober shows George his design for the platforms, George says, “Hey why don’t I help you with this? I’m in between projects. We could knock this off before I leave for LA. Be fun working together, don’t you think?”
fin
