After the ceremony, as Danny was having a private word with his father, Thelma huddled with Laura in a corner of the courthouse lobby and explained her appearance. “It’s called the punk look, the latest thing in Britain. No one’s wearing it over here yet. In fact hardly anyone’s wearing it in Britain, either, but in a few years everyone will dress like this. It’s great for my act. I look freaky, so people want to laugh as soon as I step on the stage. It’s also good for me. I mean, face it, Shane, I’m not exactly blossoming with age. Hell, if homely was a disease and had an organized charity. I’d be their poster child. But the two great things about punk style is you get to hide behind flamboyant makeup and hair, so no one can tell just how homely you are—and you’re supposed to look weird, anyway. Jesus, Shane, Danny’s a big guy. You’ve told me so much about him on the phone, but you never once said he was so huge Put him in a Godzilla suit, turn him loose in New York, film the results, and you could make one of those movies without having to build expensive miniature sets. So you love him, huh?”
“I adore him,” Laura said. “He’s as gentle as he is big. maybe because of all the violence he saw and was a part of in Vietnam, or maybe because he’s always been gentle at heart. He’s sweet. Thelma, and he’s thoughtful, and he thinks I’m one of the best writers he’s ever read.”
“And when he first started giving you toads, you though! he a psychopath.”
“A minor misjudgment.”
Two uniformed police officers passed through the courthouse lobby, flanking a bearded young man in handcuffs, taking him to one of the courtrooms. The prisoner gave Thelma a looking over as he passed and said, “Hey, mama, let’s get it on!”
“Ah, the Ackerson charm,” Thelma said to Laura. “You get a guy who’s a combination of a Greek god, a teddy bear, and Bennett Cerf, and I get crude propositions from the dregs of society. But come to think of it, I never even used to get that, so maybe my time is coming yet.”
“You underrate yourself, Thelma. You always have. Some very special guy’s going to see what a treasure you are—”
“Charles Manson when he’s paroled.”
“No. Someday you’re going to be every bit as happy as I am. I know it. Destiny, Thelma.”
“Good heavens, Shane, you’ve become a raging optimist! What about the lightning? All those deep conversations we had on the floor of our room at Caswell—you remember? We decided that life is just an absurdist comedy, and every once in a while it’s suddenly interrupted with thunderbolts of tragedy to give the story balance, to make the slapstick seem funnier by comparison.”
“Maybe it’s struck for the last time in my life,” Laura said.
Thelma stared hard at her. “Wow. I know you, Shane, and I know you realize what emotional risk you’re putting yourself at by even just wanting to be this happy. I hope you’re right, kid, and I bet you are. I bet there’ll be no more lightning for you.”
“Thank you, Thelma.”
“And I think your Danny is a sweetheart, a jewel. But I’ll tell you something that ought to mean a lot more than my opinion: Ruthie would have loved him too; Ruthie would have thought he was perfect.”
They held each other tightly, and for a moment they were young girls again, defiant yet vulnerable, filled with both the cockeyed confidence and the terror of blind fate that had shaped their shared adolescence.
Sunday, July 24, when they returned from a week-long honeymoon in Santa Barbara, they went grocery shopping, then cooked dinner together—tossed salad, sourdough bread, microwave meatballs, and spaghetti—at the apartment in Tustin. She’d given up her own place and moved in with him a few days before the wedding. According to the plan that they had worked out, they would stay at the apartment for two years, maybe three. (They had talked about their future so often and in such detail that they now capitalized those two words in their minds—The Plan—as if they were referring to some cosmic owner’s manual that had come with their marriage and that could be relied upon for an accurate picture of their destiny as husband and wife.) So after two years, maybe three, they would be able to afford the down payment on the right house without dipping into the tidy stock portfolio that Danny was building, and only then would they move.