The wizards of Wyvern had given me and Sasha an existence as reduced to
the essentials as was Bobby Halloway’s.
Friendship, love, and surf Get them while they’re hot. Get them before
they’re gone. Get them while You’re still human enough to know how
precious they are.
For a while we lay in silence, holding each other, waiting for time to
start flowing again. Or maybe hoping that it never would.
Then Sasha said, “Let’s cook.”
“I think we just did.”
“I mean omelets.”
“Mminnumn. All those delicious egg whites,” I said, ridiculing her
tendency to carry the concept of a healthy diet to extremes.
“I’ll use the whole eggs today.”
“Now I know it’s the end of the world.”
“Cooked in butter.”
“With cheese?”
“Somebody’s got to keep the cows in business.”
“Butter, cheese, egg yolks. So You’ve decided on suicide.”
We were doing cool, but we weren’t being cool.
We both knew it, too.
We kept at it anyway, because to do otherwise would be to admit how
scared we were.
The omelets were exceptionally good. So were the fried potatoes and
the heavily buttered English muffins.
As Sasha and I ate by candlelight, Orson circled the kitchen table,
niewling plaintively and making starving-child-of-the-ghetto eyes at us
when we looked down at him.
“You already ate everything I put in your bowl,” I told him.
He chuffed as if astonished that I would make such a claim, and he
resumed mewling pitiably at Sasha as though trying to assure her that I
was lying, that no food whatsoever had yet been provided him. He
rolled onto his back, wriggled, and pawed at the air in an all-out
assault of merciless cuteness, trying to earn a nibble. He stood on
his hind feet and turned in a circle. He was shameless.
With one foot, I pushed a third chair away from the table and said,
“Okay, sit up here.”
Immediately he leaped onto the chair and sat at eager attention,
regarding me intently.
I said, “Ms. Goodall here has bought a fully radical, way insane story
from me, without any proof except a few months of diary entries by an
obviously disturbed priest. She probably did this because she is
critically sex crazy and needs a man, and I’m the only one that’ll have
her.”
Sasha threw a corner of buttered toast at me. It landed on the table
in front of Orson.
He darted for it.
“No way, bro!” I said.
He stopped with his mouth open and his teeth bared, an inch from the
scrap of toast. Instead of eating the morsel, he sniffed it with
obvious pleasure.
“If You help me prove to Ms. Goodall that what I’ve told her about the
Wyvern project is true, I’ll share some of my omelet and potatoes with
You.”
“Chris, his heart,” Sasha worried, backsliding into her Grace Granola
persona.
“He doesn’t have a heart,” I said. “He’s all stomach.”
Orson looked at me reproachfully, as if to say that it wasn’t fair to
engage in put-down humor when he was unable to participate.
To the dog I said, “When someone nods his head, that means yes. When
he shakes his head side to side, that means no. You understand that,
don’t You?”
Orson stared at me, panting and grinning stupidly.
“Maybe You don’t trust Roosevelt Frost,” I said, “but You have to trust
this lady here. You don’t have a choice, because she and I are going
to be together from now on, under the same roof, for the rest of our
lives.”
Orson turned his attention to Sasha.
“Aren’t we?” I asked her. “The rest of our lives?”
She smiled. “I love You, Snowman.”
“I love You, Ms. Goodall.”
Looking at Orson, she said, “From now on, pooch, it’s not the two of
You anymore. It’s the three of us.”
Orson blinked at me, blinked at Sasha, stared with unblinking desire at
the bite of toast on the table in front of him.
“Now,” I said, “do You understand about nods and shakes?”
After a hesitation, Orson nodded.
Sasha gasped.
“Do You think she’s nice?” I asked.
Orson nodded.
“Do You like her?”
Another nod.
A giddy delight swept through me. Sasha’s face was shining with the