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“Lady Sky,” Da
“Yeah, it’s me,” she said, hugging him; she pulled his face to her chest. He just shook against her. “Boy, you’re even more of a mess than I thought you would be,” Amy told him, “but I’m here now, and I’ve got you-you’re going to be okay.”
“Where have you been?” he managed to ask her.
“I had another project-two, actually,” she told him. “They turned out to be a waste of my time. But I’ve been thinking about you-for years.”
Da
“I might have come sooner, you bastard, if you’d answered my letter,” Amy said to him.
“I never saw your letter. My dad read it and threw it away. He thought you were a stripper,” Da
“That was a long time ago-before the skydiving,” Amy said. “Was your dad ever in Chicago? I haven’t done any stripping since Chicago.” Da
“Jeez, you’re shaking so much-that gun might go off,” Amy told the writer.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Da
She kissed him; there was some mint-flavored gum in her mouth, but he didn’t mind. She was warm, and still sweating, but not out of breath-not even from the snowshoeing. “Can we go indoors, somewhere?” Amy asked him. (At a glance, anyone could see that Granddaddy’s cabin was uninhabitable-unless you were Ketchum, or a ghost. From the back dock of the island, it was impossible to see the other buildings-even when there wasn’t a snowstorm.) Da
They stopped at the writing shack, so that Da
Amy told him that she’d lost her little boy when she was much younger; she’d already lost him when Da
“We’re the same age, more or less,” Amy told the writer. “I’ve been sixty for the last couple of years, I think-at least that’s what I tell the guys who ask.”
“You look fifty,” Da
“Are you trying to get in my pants, or something?” Amy asked him. She read those sentences, and the fragments of sentences, from the first chapter-the lines he’d thumbtacked to the pine-board wall of the writing shack. “What are these?” she asked.
“They’re sentences, or parts of sentences, ahead of myself; they’re waiting for me to catch up to them,” he told her. “They’re all lines from my first chapter-I just haven’t found the first sentence yet.”
“Maybe I’ll help you find it,” Amy said. “I’m not going anywhere for a while. I don’t have any other projects.” Da
“She there yet?” Andy asked. “Who is she?”
“She’s the one I’ve been waiting for,” Da
“Sometimes,” Lady Sky reminded him, when he hung up. “This time, anyway.”
What might the cook have said to his son, if he’d had time to utter some proper last words before the cowboy shot him in the heart? At best, Dominic might have expressed the hope that his lonely son “find someone”-only that. Well, Da
SHE’D BEEN LIVING IN MINNESOTA for the last few years, Amy said. (“If you think Toronto’s cold, try Mi
Amy Martin-Martin had been her maiden name, and she’d taken it back “years ago”-was a Canadian. She’d lived a long time in the United States, and had become an American citizen, but she was “at heart” a Canadian, Amy said, and she’d always wanted to come back to Canada.
Why had she gone to the States in the first place? Da
She described her politics as “largely indifferent now.” She was sick of how little Americans knew about the rest of the world-or how little they cared to know. After two terms, the failed policies of the Bush presidency would probably leave the country (and the rest of the world) in a terrible mess. What Amy Martin meant by this was that it would then be high time for some hero on a horse to ride in, but what could one hero on one horse do?
Not much would change, Lady Sky said. She had fallen to earth in a country that didn’t believe in angels; yet the Bible-huggers had hijacked one of the two major political parties there. (With the Bible-huggers, not much would ever change.) Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”-what Da
By the time Da