So Much for That Read Online Free PDF Page A

her attention had wandered.
    “Gnu,” he appealed, pronouncing the G ; the endearment went back to their very first research trip to Kenya, where she had done cracking impressions of wildebeests, hooking her hands over her head for horns and wrenching her long face into a pleading expression that was sad and dumb. The antic had been girlish and beguiling. He used to call her Gnu all the time, and lately—well, lately, he realized with a shock, he hadn’t been calling her anything at all. These are real tickets. For a real airplane, that takes off in one week. I would like you to come with me. I would like Zach to come with us, and if we leave as a family I will drag him down the Jetway by the hair. But I am going , with or without you.”
    Damned if she didn’t seem to find his declaration hilarious. “An ultimatum, then?” She drained her glass, as if to stifle laughter.
    “An invitation,” he countered.
    “A week from now you’re getting on a plane to fly to an island you’ve never been to, where you’ll spend the rest of your life. Whatever were all those ‘research trips’ for?”
    In her use of you as opposed to we he read her answer, and he wasn’t prepared for the sudden falling sensation in his chest. Although he had tried to be realistic with himself, apparently he had held out hope that she and Zack might come with him to Pemba after all. Still, this face-off was young, so he held out further hope that—for the first time in the history of the universe—he might change her mind.
    “I picked Pemba precisely because we haven’t been there. That means you can’t have already come up with a zillion reasons why yet another option is off the table.”
    When she said nothing in response, he was able to remember some of what he had recited over the steering wheel earlier this afternoon on the Henry Hudson Parkway. “Goa got the all-clear until you read about that expat Briton who was murdered by a local acquaintance in her house, and then it was too dangerous. One murder. As if people never kill each other in New York. Bulgaria would have been a steal when we first lit on it, and in the Western world, too, if barely, with broadband and a postal service and clean water. But the food was too bland. The food . As if we couldn’t rustle up a little garlic and rosemary. Meantime, the property prices have already started to escalate, and now it’s too late. Ditto Eritrea, which piqued your imagination: proud new country, warm people, espresso on every corner, and the fifties architecture was a kick. Now, lucky for you, the government’s gone to hell. You loved Morocco, remember? Cinnamon and terra cotta; neither the food nor the landscape was bland . It seemed so promising that I agreed to stay on when my mother had her stroke, and we got back half a day too late to say goodbye.”
    “You made up for it.” Ah, the funeral expenses. If Shep did not resent his family’s impositions on his finances, Glynis resented them for him.
    “But after 9/11,” he plowed on, “suddenly all Muslim countries—including Turkey, to my own disappointment—got knocked off the list. We had a terrific opportunity when the currency collapsed in Argentina. Before that, we could have bought just about anything in Southeast Asia during that financial crisis. But now all those currencies have recovered, and our resources would never stretch for thirty or forty years in any of those countries today. In Cuba, you couldn’t live without shampoo and toilet paper. Croatia’s residency requirements entailed too much red tape. The slums in Kenya were too depressing; South Africa made you feel too guilty for being white. Laos, Portugal, Tonga, and Bhutan—I can’t even remember what was wrong with all of them anymore, though”—he indulged a bitterness—“I’m sure you do.”
    Glynis exuded an aggressive mildness, and seemed to be enjoying herself. “You’re the one who ruled out France,” she said sweetly.
    “That’s