Lee was glad to be home. She'd almost never spent the night away from her daughters before. Bar Stool delivered her at her door in midafternoon sunshine, with the temperature 42 degrees Fahrenheitshirtsleeve weather. Instead of going to the office after unpacking, she phoned Ben, telling him she was home, then drew the drapes, set an alarm clock, and napped on the sofa.
Previously she'd had her project tugging at her. It had been interesting and challenging. Often it had taken an act of will to leave work at the end of the day. But the project was finished, including the procedures for adjusting activities to the new chart. All that was left was any fine-tuning that might prove necessary. Lor Lu had understood it thoroughly, and been enthusiastic when she'd gone over the completed product with him. Minutes later Ngunda had knocked, asking to see it, and he too had left praising her.
She was proud of it, but its completion had left a vacuum in her life. It hadn't, however, left her unemployed, for which she found herself grateful. She was to be Millennium's organizational troubleshooter. Her first assignment was to get more intimately acquainted with people at the ground level and in the field, so on this afternoon it was easy to laze around for a few hours.
It was she who fixed supper that evening. She actually cooked quite well, when she took the time. Here they didn't eat to television as they had at Bridgeport. Lee wanted as much communication with the girls as possible.
"What was it like on the reservation, Mom?" Becca asked.
"Cold."
"Come on, Mom," Raquel said, "she didn't mean the weather. What was it like on an Indian reservation?"
"I've only seen one," Lee said, "and it was cold."
"Mo-om!"
"It was minus twenty-nine degrees the first morning at breakfast, and minus fourteen degrees at lunchtime. And windy! They'd had a snowstorm, and the snowplows were going all the time. Mr. Makes-A-Place-For-Them . . ."
"Mr. who?" Raquel asked.
"Willard Makes-A-Place-For-Them. That was his name in English. I didn't learn to say it in the Crow language, but that's what it means. He told me to call him Bill. I thought of him as Mr. M. It was he who took me around and showed me things. He said the snow never melts there. It just wears out, blowing around."
Ben grinned. Becca laughed. Raquel broke up. "It really melts though, I'll bet," Raquel said when she'd regained her composure.
"Of course," Becca told her. "I looked up the climatic data for Billings, close to the reservation. The thirty-year average temperature for January is twenty-one degrees, so lucky Mom got to see a cold spell, an 'Alberta Clipper.' It can get really cold, and then warm up big league when a chinook wind blows. It can be way below zero one day and way above freezing the next."
Raquel gestured toward her sister. "An old scholar in observation mode," she said, "with a goal of trivia."
Becca began a retort, about old sages in idiot mode, with a goal of obnoxious, but their dad was frowning, so instead she turned back to her mother. "What was it like besides cold and snowy?" she asked.
"Well, the reservation is almost as big as Connecticut. But Lodge Grass, where I was, is about a quarter as big as Walsenburg. I went to a high school basketball game the first night, and was really impressed! They play so well! Their coach had set scoring records at the University of Montana, when he was a student there, and their school has won the Montana state high school championship several times, for schools its size. One of its graduates won the national best cowboy award in college rodeo last year, too."
She couldn't think of anything else that might interest the girls about her trip.
"What about Ladder?" Ben asked.
Lee frowned thoughtfully. "Its services are available to all children ten and older," she said, "free through Life Healing." Her voice stiffened. "Although"her gesture indicated the girls"I can't see what good it does perfectly healthy children."
Becca and Raquel gave serious attention to their food. Life healing was another sensitive issue.
"If it helps reduce alcoholism . . ." Ben said.
Lee nodded. "It has, a lot. Mr. M showed me the legal and medical statistics. They're quite open about the problems they had for so longtheir land and livelihood taken from them, their culture and beliefs denigrated and forbidden, their children taken from them in the old days, and brainwashed for years before being allowed to go home. The Crow Tribe came through better than lots, but even so . . ." She turned to Becca. "They call themselves the Apsáalooke, the 'Children of the Large-Beaked Bird.' I made a special effort to learn to say it in Crow. It seemed like something you'd like to know."
Becca got from her chair, went around the table, and wrapping her arms around her mother's neck, kissed her cheek. Raquel was there before Becca had finished, and added her own hug and kiss. "We're glad you're home, Mom," Becca said.
"Yeah," Raquel added. "We missed you. Are you going to have to be gone very much now?"
"From time to time. But I'm not worried. You'll take good care of your dad, I know."
"He didn't cook as well while you were gone." Raquel was back in her chair again, talking between bites. "He gave us limburger cheese and anchovie pizza for supper last night . . ."
Lee's eyebrows raised.
"And the night before that, balut and stuffed dog!" She broke into giggles.
"He didn't either," Becca said to her mother, then turned to Raquel. "You don't even know what limburger cheese is."
"I do so! It's a kind of cheese that really stinks!"
"Honey," Lee said, "I'd rather you didn't say 'stinks' at the table." She looked at Ben. "What did you feed them?"
He grinned. "For supper? I didn't. We ate at staff. For breakfast they got the usual: eggs, toast, cereal, and juice."
"What did you get, Mom?" Raquel asked.
"Café food. I ate in the café next to the motel." She turned to Raquel. "What were those other foods you named? Or did you make them up?"
"No, they're real. Domingo Morgan spent last summer with his Filipino grandparents on Luzon, and he told us about it in human geography. I better not tell you what they are at the table though." She made a face, then laughed. "Worse than limburger cheese and anchovies. He ate some before he knew what they were, and they tasted pretty good, he said. But if he'd known what balut was, he'd never have eaten it."
"If you don't eat your mashed potatoes and gravy," her dad told her, "they'll be cold."
"I'll just put them in the microwave."
"Eat!"
She did then, finishing soon after the others.
"May I leave the table, Mom?" Becca asked.
"Before dessert?"
"Dad made cherry pie for you, and I don't like cherry pie that much."
"Ice cream goes with it," her stepfather told her, "or by itself if you'd rather."
"No thanks. I'm already full anyway. May I?"
Raquel passed on dessert too, and both of them left. It was her turn to be first on the computer, while Becca lay on the living room floor with a book. Lee and Ben remained in the breakfast nook over coffee.
"When's your next trip?" Ben asked, speaking quietly, as they often did for privacy.
"In two weeks. To the Seattle office. I'll fly up one afternoon, spend two days there, and fly back the next. It's supposed to be pretty representative of the U.S. branches. Then I might be sent to Europe for a few days, to Rotterdam and Copenhagen." She examined the coffee in her cup. "Did you miss me?"
Ben smiled. "You were only gone two days. Be gone four and I'll miss you."
She frowned as if examining his words, or her feelings about them.
"Do you believe in souls?" he asked.
She looked up at him. "Yes," she said. Then added, "I think so."
"Then let me tell you how it seems to me, about us. Lots of times, two people get married on the basis of physical attraction, two primates, two Homo sapiens who look good to each other. Or maybe they get married for convenience, or because they both like the same things, or it seems to them they'd better do it now, before it's too late. Or for whatever reasons.
"But sometimes two people, before or after they marry, touch soul to soul. And when that happens, a different kind of bond forms between them. They may or may not recognize consciously what happened, but they do realize, at least briefly, that it was something special. And if they validate it and build on it, the relationship can be very very good.
"That's what happened between you and me. At least that's what I think." He lowered his voice a bit more. "The physical is nice, believe me. But it seems to me we have more than that going for us. Something stronger. So for me, it's fine for you to be gone a few days. Weeks if necessary. I'm comfortable with that because I'm comfortable with us."
It had been more answer than she'd bargained for, been ready for, or knew how to handle. She didn't meet his eyes. "Do you ever look at other women?" she murmured.
"Hey, sweetheart, part of me's a healthy, forty-year-old male primate. Of course I look at other women, but looking's as far as it goes."
"You don'tthink about them in a sexual way?"
"I respond to them physically, but I don't fantasize about them. If you were gone long enough I might fantasize, but I can't imagine making a pass at one."
Now she did meet his eyes. "You're a nice man, Ben Shoreff. A very nice man. I can't imagine what I did to deserve you."
"Hmm. Well," he growled softly, "try imagining what you're going to do to deserve me when we go to bed tonight."
"Oh! You!" She cocked her coffee cup, then set it back on its saucer, and lowered her voice almost to a whisper. "What's the earliest we can put the girls to bed?"
"Steady, sweetheart. Their usual bedtime, nine. That's about the earliest we can get away with."