So Brave, Young, and Handsome Read Online Free PDF Page A

honest any number of times. In fact the very next evening I strode into the parlor intent on unburdening. When I opened the door she said, “Come see this, love.”
    She was painting daffodils on a wide field, a handsome thousand or so yellow daubs. Susannah’s work was well thought of in Northfield—this one had been commissioned by a local college president.
    “Howser offered me my job back today,” I said.
    So help me this was the honest truth.
    “Howser doesn’t deserve you.” Her paintbrush darted and stabbed like a hummingbird. “Here, look at my flowers.”
    There are times with Susannah when it’s better to come back later, but my conscience had me, as Redstart liked to say,
by the windpipe
. “I saw him at the hardware store. I was looking at some rope and he came over and said hello.”
    “Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said my wife.
    “Two of his people have left in the past month.”
    “You told him no, I assume.” Susannah cultivated a firm dislike of my former employer, who had told me several times I “didn’t tally well” with the vaunted postal efficiencies.
    “I said we would talk it over. He seems rather harried.”
    “He should be harried, to solicit a man he treated first with disdain and later with envy. A little harrying might improve him—in fact I am certain it will.” Though elegant as lace, Susannah was ever keen to set bridges alight on my behalf.
    “I thought it gracious of him to ask.”
    “Did you tell Mr. Howser your new book is nearly done?”
    “No,” I admitted, and stopped there. You should know this about my wife: colors are as strong spirits to her. Yellow makes her insouciant, reckless, caustic. The brighter tints of orange render her nearly dangerous. If it’s a quiet, confiding talk you’re after, by all means wait until her palette is stocked with cooler, more seafaring shades. I said, “After all, it isn’t what you’d call
nearly done
.”
    “Well. Soon it will be.” She looked at me, the brush hovering over daffodils. “You haven’t read to me in some time. How is that rogue Mr. Dan faring?”
    That’s right—I hadn’t yet told her Dan Roscoe had been shelved. Nor that I’d begun a new tale about a pirate with a glaring birthmark and a strange halfheartedness about his career. I was forty pages in. Already there were signs of decay.
    She set the brush down. “Monte, is the work going slowly?”
    “Yes.”
    “But there’s progress, isn’t there?”
    “A thousand words a day.”
    She took my hands in hers. “As you love me, there is progress?”
    There is no excuse for lying, but that very morning I’d read over her shoulder while she wrote to her mother:
My darling is still at work on his second book, which none can doubt will exceed his first in reach and power
.
    “Oh, good progress,” I assured her, and leaned down for a kiss, and then, as if to seal my deception, peered in at her daffodils. I was amazed to see not only yellow and orange in those petals but also blue and violet and a spicy russet that somehow fit. “Why, sweet, that’s exactly right. That’s better than real.”
    “Then I will finish it,” she said, clearly pleased, “and you will finish Mr. Dan, and we’ll throw ourselves a party.” With that she let go of me, and her brush took flight again.
    Do you see how it was that I could not bear to fail in front of her? Do you see why I deflected?
    And so I rose each day and dipped my nib. I filled my hopeless quota. I was the Dickensian halfwit who composes letters by the hour, only to make them into kites and fly them up to God.

8
    Glendon began taking supper with us once or twice a week. He kept an orderly greenplot and never arrived minus chard or kale or chives in wet burlap. At first he was a quiet and somewhat formal visitor, yet the whole house lightened with him there. I admired his plain language and courtesy and the way he found everything interesting but himself. Redstart of course was polite as a pry