Rapture

"Well, the winters got to be too much for Doris," Mrs. Brewer continued enthusiastically. "That driveway is murder when there's any snow at all. And ice? Oh! It's impossible. And being all alone up there in that house just wasn't good for her. So she finally put the house on the market in January, which wasn't a good time for that, but she'd had enough and she moved down near Donnie in Tampa. Now she has a nice bungalow-style condominium. I've got some snapshots of it inside."

"Good for her," Jeff said impatiently. "But-"

"Now, you said you were Georgianne's friend?"

At last. "That's right," Jeff said.

"Well. Georgianne worked in Boston for a year or two after she finished college, and then she married a young man by the name of Sean Corcoran. Did you know him?"

"No, I don't think so."

"I've met him a couple of times," Mrs. Brewer said, "and he's a very nice person, very nice."

"That's good."

"They have one child, a daughter. Her name is Bonnie. Now if you're a friend of Georgianne, you know she was always very bright."

"Yes."

"Right. Well, I hear from Doris how the kids are doing, you know, and Bonnie is just fantastic at schoolwork. They say she has a brain like a computer."

In the computer field this is no compliment, but Jeff didn't tell Mrs. Brewer that. Now that he was finally hearing some real news about Georgianne, he was having a hard time absorbing it.

"They live in Foxrock, over near Danbury," the elderly woman went on. "Sean teaches high school there. They have a very nice house. But it's kind of sad, isn't it, the way families are so scattered these days. Connecticut and Chicago and Florida ..."

Jeff nodded sympathetically and took a step back toward the car. He had what he wanted, more or less.

"Thanks very much for your help."

"I'll tell them you were asking for them. Doris still calls up from time to time. What'd you say your name was?"

"Lisker," Jeff replied softly, turning away. "Thanks again." He got into the car.

"What was that?" 8

Mrs. Brewer hadn't caught it, but she knew she'd heard the name the first time. It would come back to her sooner or later. She had read about this somewhere. The trick was not to try to force it. Once you saw or heard something, it was in your mind for good. Maybe you couldn't always find it just when you wanted it, but eventually it would pop up again. All it took was patience.

She watched the young man drive away, noticing the New York license plate on the back end of the car, and then she got on with her weeding.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Jeffs talk with Mrs. Brewer had left him determined to finish his business in Millville as quickly as possible. He no longer had the slightest reason to linger. He took Uncle Roy and Aunt Kitty out to dinner, and then spent all of Wednesday morning sorting through personal effects at the house. It was a strange experience. Most of the things to be thrown away belonged to him, not his father. Junk, he considered it, left over from childhood and adolescence, things he'd never bothered shipping out to California. When he was done, he had filled several trash bags.

Tuesday night, after taking Aunt Kitty and Uncle Roy back to their house, he had come home and sat in the living room watching television and drinking the rest of the beer he had bought. It was another silly luxury, like cruising around that afternoon. In California, he saw little television. Now, in the house where he'd been raised, it was impossible to resist, and the shows were right out of his past: Wally and the Beaver, Bilko, Dobie Gillis, Twilight Zone, The Honeymooners, and Love that Bob. It was like being on vacation, something he hadn't done in more than ten years; and it had taken a funeral to achieve it.

Perhaps if he had been able to do something like that with Audrey, something as simple as sitting up late once in a while and watching old TV shows ... She had divorced him because he was a workaholic, and because he showed no willingness to change. But he knew it was foolish to think that anything could have saved their marriage.

Audrey had never understood or accepted that he simply couldn't afford to take much time off from work. He and Ted had just started their own company, entering one of the riskiest and most competitive areas of the computer-science field. For the first five years, neither of them had ever put in less than ninety hours a week. To do so, they were convinced, would be suicidal. Then they'd be damaged goods; they'd never get the money or the business to start over.

You had only to glance upstate to Silicon Valley to see how many others there were, breathing down your neck, and to learn the lesson of all those hundreds of failures, bankruptcies, and personal catastrophes. Somehow, amazingly, Jeff and Ted hadn't burned out. Jeff had lost a marriage and Ted was a walking pharmacy, but they reckoned they were lucky. The pace was still furious, but they were down to sixty-hour weeks, and the company was secure now, thriving.