Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Page B

neither one of these men have found her on his own? That was the question. What was marriage anyway, if it involved the yoking of two who would not have encountered each other naturally on the planet?
    â€œLook, Kevin is a great husband, a great son-in-law,” Sam had started in, in the early days. “But aren’t there Kevins everywhere? Or not really, no, but I mean how did it happen to be Kevin?” In time we saw that Kevin came from somewhere and had a loving family and memories and a large place of his own in the world, as it is not so easy to see when you first meet anybody, especially your daughter’s suitor. He had not been provisional at all; he had been permanent. In time we saw that he was in fact the man Meg saw clearly when she met him in the café: good, kind, and if less worldly than many, more upright
than most. No, there were not Kevins everywhere. We mourned him. For months after he was buried, with Meg staring into his book on the porch, I would have to say to Sam, “Dear, go a little easy with the sighing. It’s her loss.” And he could have said the same to me.
    â€œHe was a son to us,” Sam would say, wiping his eyes.
    Lali comforted him. “It is so silly here that people say you are doing a good job when you do not weep.” Silly was the strongest insult Lali would offer the United States. Yet in India her family was plotting every day to get her out of the clutches of this country. We had broken Lali of the word nation , though she had stood up to us, arguing gently that this was the only country, really, the word seemed to fit any more, not that that was an entirely good thing.
    Now we knew Lali, she was almost part of the family; we knew she was not the child she had seemed, but a thinker, in her amiable, pragmatic way, getting her degree in political science in hopes of working in an embassy. A smiling thinker. Unlike our daughter, who was a sober feeler. At any rate the United States loomed forbiddingly in the thinking of Lali’s family (“They are a bit less venturesome than I”), with its perilous cities and random mixing and licentious customs, as she reported, her accent deepening as she recited the warnings of her aunts. It was their immutable plan to lure her back to the chosen suitor, now past thirty and still waiting for his marriage to her.
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    THE BABY WAS a beauty. Our grandson. He had his father’s well-shaped head and Meg’s soft, thick brown hair. He had an easy nature, like Meg, and an absorbed, tinkering, solving disposition, like Marcus.

    For she had found him again. Andrei, of all people, had suggested it, as a joke. When she had finally made it clear that she could not marry Andrei, he had packed up and gone back to L.A. He was working as a key grip while he made his own films; he had met a sound mixer who was comforting him. He still called Meg, and he called Sam and me to ask about her. He had become a man who took the time to call. He called to tell us to see obscure movies he had worked on, and then to tell us he was engaged.
    Meg had gone back to the farm near the airport, back to the porch. Marcus was not only there, he had twenty horses boarding and had resumed planting the fields he had let to the neighboring farm.
    It was spring. They walked in the fields and on into the woods where some of the horses liked to scratch themselves against trees. They climbed several fences. What were the steps over the fence, so perfectly fitted for climbing over? They were stiles. He had built them. Stiles. What were those big white flowers in the next field? Where? There, in the grass. He threw back his head and laughed.
    The laugh, Lali had said, is an attribute of the man, and if you delight in it, go forward.
    â€œFlowers! Those are calves.” He was still laughing, bent over with it. “Herefords. That’s their white faces.” The calves were lying down, hidden in the thick grass.
    â€œI’m a