Larque on the Wing by Nancy Springer Page A

door, and looked at her husband. Twenty years married, and didn’t he understand anything? She found him wanting, and this distressed her mildly; she preferred to approve of Hoot.
    â€œI liked her better messy,” she reproached him, “and I still can’t paint.”
    He seemed not to hear reproof, merely a statement of fact. “Well, you’d better get started up again.” Hoot crossed the room, plopped himself down at the kitchen table opposite Sky, and said, “I quit my job.”
    Larque no longer bothered panicking when this happened. She asked merely, “Why?”
    â€œThat Alec.” This was his boss, Alexandra. “You know I installed that garbage disposal for her a few weeks back.”
    â€œYes.” This had been a freebie that shot most of a Saturday afternoon. “So?”
    â€œSo she goes and gives me a gift certificate for dinner for you and me at some restaurant.”
    Sounded good to her. “So?”
    He looked astonished, evidently expecting her to understand at once. “So don’t you see? What the hell does she think I am, some sort of money whore?” Impassioned, Hoot was turning pink, and whenever he got that way he reminded her of a big golden retriever with a pink nose. He expounded, “She should take us out to dinner if she wants to return the favor. Giving a gift certificate, that’s just the same as if she had paid me.”
    Probably the poor woman was baffled by him. “Hoot,” Larque told him, “not everybody plays by the same rules you do.”
    â€œWell, they ought to.”
    â€œWhy should they? Anyway, the rules change every day.”
    â€œNot mine, they don’t. Anyway, I handed it back to her and told her why, and we got in a big pissing contest, and I quit before she could fire me.”
    â€œIf you’d let her fire you,” Larque pointed out, “you could collect unemployment.”
    â€œThat’s not the point! Plus, I haven’t been working for her long enough to collect unemployment. So I’d rather quit.”
    â€œIdiot,” Larque muttered.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œI’m thinking, kind of a quixotic reason to quit.”
    â€œWell, she’s the one who took offense when I tried to set her straight.”
    â€œYou don’t try to set the boss straight!”
    â€œIf you’re me, you do.”
    This was true. And for most of their marriage Larque had cherished—let her count the ways—this man who was quixotic, unpredictable, boyish, full of cloud dreams and masculine quirks and surprises. Generally she did not try to tell him what to do, proud because she had a career and made money and could spoil him, could keep him like a beautiful, large, impractical pet, like a palomino stallion in the living room. Generally he did not try to tell her what to do, either. He had made her the tacit exception to his idealistic rules about human conduct; she could have given him a gift certificate and he would have found a dozen reasons why it was wonderful. To Larque, this irrationale was part of Hoot’s charm, and it included his attitude toward her doppelgangers, which was simply that whatever Larque did was fine with him as long as it didn’t keep him awake at night. One thing Larque had noticed early, when the children were yowling infants: Hoot’s chivalry ended when the lights went off. Luckily, doppelgangers were usually quiet as ghosts.
    Probably he was the only man in the world who would have put up with them at all. Larque had searched long and hard for him. As a teenage girl, living in the woodsy A-frame with her Wiccan mother, she had read paperback romances and dreamed wet dreams and realized that her own situation was desperate if not hopeless: what man in his right mind would get involved with a paranormal-textbook case like her? Embarrassing things happened when she was around. Eggs dropped out of birds like tiny bombs falling, and