It was the wrong thing to say. Andrew whirled on the bench and shook his finger in her face. “Don’t you dare,” he said vehemently. “It would kill Mother. She’s been through enough, and you can’t repay her generosity by extending an olive branch to the O’Gradys. Mother did more than enough when she took you in twenty-six years ago.”
“Shh!” she warned. “Sam might overhear.”
The boy was loping toward them with Bandit at his heels. “Can I have a nickel for a pretzel?” he asked Andrew. “Bandit wants one too, so that means two nickels.”
Andrew scrounged in his vest pocket and produced the coins, then waved Sam away. His voice was calmer when he turned back to her. “I’m sorry for speaking bluntly of things better left in the past, but my loyalty will always be to Mother. I’ve told Dad that if I catch him being unfaithful again, I’ll quit working for the company.”
“You would really do that?” she asked in surprise.
“I would.” His face was somber as he watched Sam buy two enormous pretzels. “Managing the company is harder than I expected. It seems like every day new problems crop up.”
“But you enjoy the work, don’t you?”
He shrugged. “It’s not like I get to spend my days taking pretty pictures. It’s one headache after another.”
She ignored the swipe. Andrew had never approved of her job, and surely his work was more stressful than hers.
“Do you remember that article in the newspaper a few days ago?” she asked. “The one that Papa got so angry about?”
“I remember.”
“Is there any truth to the notion that the chemicals we use are unsafe?”
“It would be worse if we didn’t use them,” he replied. “We put a tiny bit of preservatives into canned foods that could sit on store shelves for months. Just this year I spent a fortune commissioning tests thatproveour preservatives are safe.”
“You did?” she asked hopefully. “I thought you said tests like that were too expensive.”
Andrew gave an embarrassed laugh. “Let me clarify. The committee Dad works on paid for the tests. They hired a bunch of college laboratories to buy hundreds of rabbits and run the experiments.”
“And what did the tests show?”
He shrugged. “They won’t be finished for a few months. Look, our food is perfectly safe, and you need to keep away from that Poison Squad nonsense that uses human test subjects. I’ve never seen Dad so annoyed as when he spotted that article in the newspaper.”
Andrew consulted his watch and called for Sam to return. Their train had just pulled into the station, but before boarding, Andrew turned to her.
“Don’t make Dad angry,” he said. “I may be in charge of the company, but he’s still in charge of the family. You don’t want to end up like Aunt Stella.”
Andrew snapped his fingers to summon Sam, then boarded the train without even saying good-bye.
The strangest thing happened when Luke went shopping for a new typewriter. He went to a department store to try out all three models on display. He fed a piece of paper beneath the roller of the first typewriter and twisted the knob to position it, then began banging out text until he heard the satisfyingdingat the end of the line. He pushed the carriage return lever and commenced another line.
He tried all three machines. Price was no object. A typewriter was going to be the single most important tool he’d use to start changing the world. All three machines were perfectly fine, and he could buy one, walk out of the shop, and be back in business within an hour.
Except he couldn’t do it.
It was irrational to mourn a broken piece of equipment, but he did. He’d had that machine for more than a decade. He took it to college with him and wrote his first published article on it. He wrote his translation ofDon Quixoteon it. That old,mangled typewriter was an inanimate object beyond repair, and he shouldn’t feel disloyal for buying a replacement.
The salesman came over to check on him. “Well, sir? Will one of these suffice?”
This embarrassing surge of sentimentality for his old typewriter was ridiculous, and he needed to get over it.
But not quite yet. Gray had a typewriter he could borrow for a while.
He pulled the paper-release bar and lifted the practice page from the machine. “I’ll be back in a few days,” he told the salesman. Maybe then he’d have his head screwed on firmly enough to quit worrying about the feelings of a broken typewriter.
And a cheerful, high-spirited girl who took a picture of him with a dog.
He wallowed in the memories the entire journey to the Delacroix Global Spice factory. He might fall for another woman someday, but it would be impossible to forget Marianne. She crawled out onto the ice! Onto the Capitol dome! She was brave enough to walk into a jail but tenderly compassionate when he hightailed it out of there like a weakling. Normally he considered his overblown emotionalism an asset, but today it just made him ache.
