Chapter Twenty

THE BOOKKEEPER’S WIFE

Although the springtime sun had finally emerged from behind winter’s clouds, the ground retained the cold, the moisture, and its earthy odor. Abbelina stood at the kitchen sink window, sipping tea and absently watching her son and daughter run through the muck at the playground across the street. They were not her biological children, of course, but were adopted Ethosians she and Horace had plucked from an orphanage several years earlier. Even so, she loved them like they were her own. They filled some of the holes that the war had punched through her heart.

Rebuilding her relationship with Horace had been difficult. He was not the same man who had left for the war all those years ago. His physical injuries, while dramatic, were in the largest sense superficial. On the other hand, his psychological wounds were deeper and more damaging. To their friends and neighbors he was as easygoing and placid as ever, but at home he was a harder and moodier version of his former self. She soon realized that his guilt was as deep as her own, but he expressed it differently. He sometimes withdrew into himself for hours at a time, and then lashed out at her on the smallest of pretexts. In a moment of candor, he confessed that God’s forgiveness could not seem to take away his continuing embarrassment at his actions. Abbelina found his behavior very frustrating. At the same time, she acknowledged to herself that she was not the same woman he had wed either. The war had stripped away her vivaciousness, outgoingness, and self-confidence. The upshot was that they had to rediscover each other within the confines of marriage, which was somewhat akin to learning to drive an automobile that was already on the road. Horace had almost left her several times in the months after he materialized in her living room. In each instance her gentle and shrewd supplication dissuaded him. She liked to think of their marriage as a work in progress.

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The slamming door interrupted her thoughts. “Where’s the mail?” Horace asked with his usual brusqueness before he kissed her on the cheek, knocked on the window pane, and waved at their kids.

Abbelina was pleased that he had returned home in a good mood. “I already got it. It’s on the table.”

As he flipped through the stack of letters, Abbelina asked, “Have you ever heard of Vineyard Academy?”

“No. Why?”

“Well,” she continued. “It’s a school in Valgor. Aitape, to be exact.”

“So?”

“We got their quarterly newsletter for some reason. It’s addressed specifically to you.”

Horace found it and briefly perused articles devoted to alumni news, student and faculty accomplishments, and pleas for money. On the very last page, though, was an announcement of the wedding of the school’s chancellor and one of its teachers, with an accompanying black and white photograph of the couple. The bride was dressed in a white gown that accentuated her long hair and cleavage.

Abbelina looked over his shoulder. “She doesn’t look like a chancellor at all. She’s beautiful. She looks like royalty.”

Horace nodded and put his arm around her waist.