Becca still stood by her mother. “Mom, you really won’t regret this,” she said, then picked up her book and went out to the living room.
Lee sat thoughtfully for a minute, her attention inward, then looked up at her husband. “I’m going in the bedroom for a few minutes,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong. I just need to be alone for a while.”
Ben nodded, and she left. Lying on their bed, she stared toward the ceiling, seeing nothing, reviewing first her talk with Ben, then with Susan. And told herself that whatever Millennium beliefs the girls picked up, they’d be no weirder than the things millions of children were taught in Sunday school each week. At least Life Healing didn’t seem to fill them with prejudices and false fears. Whether they’d come away with false expectations was another matter.
But then, she’d graduated from college with false expectations. Brainwashed by society, no less! She’d married Mark with false expectations. Had quit a good job—a good salary at least—and gone into business for herself with false expectations. The only major thing she’d done, she told herself, that had matched her hopes, exceeded them actually, was marry Ben.
And at any rate the damage, if any, had been done. The girls were already full of Millennium ideas, and Life Healing didn’t seem likely to harm them. Looked at honestly, she told herself, it’s just therapeutic counseling.
Life Healing. She still couldn’t see what good it could do two girls as healthy as hers. Better adjusted than their mom, she told herself.
Sighing, she got up and returned to the living room.
* * *
A while later, Raquel came out of the computer room. “Mom,” she said, “I’m going to brush and get ready for bed.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, really.”
“You look like something is. Will you tell me?”
“Well . . . Sometimes I wish I was the oldest, instead of Becca.”
“I understand. Okay. Go brush.”
Raquel disappeared into the hall. “Ben,” Lee murmured, “we might as well let both of them start at the same time.”
He scowled a mock scowl. “If you say so.”
“Snot!”
He laughed, then turned to their eldest. “Twenty minutes, Becca,” he said.
“Yes Dad.”
Gentle Ben, Lee thought. The strongest in the family.
The oven timer buzzed. Curious, she went into the kitchen and peered through the oven door. There was a cherry pie inside. She turned the buzzer off, turned on the exhaust fan, and opened the oven door. Ben, she realized, had put it in while she was in the bedroom.
“Thanks, hon,” he said. He’d followed her in.
“One more question,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Becca said something about the ‘astral zone.’ What’s the astral zone? That really sounds New Agey.”
“It is New Agey, like heaven without the harps and angelic choirs and pink clouds and alabaster pillars, or whatever. I think of it as a sort of graduate school for souls, without the bureaucracy and pressures, the campus and occasional desperation. But I suspect that’s a pretty inadequate description.” Again he grinned. “Actually I’ve never thought much about it. I’ll just wait till I get there.”
My pragmatic spiritualist, she thought. My tender, patient, loving man. “Have I told you lately that I’m the world’s smartest woman?” she asked.
His eyebrows rose. “No, I don’t believe you have.”
“And I suppose you didn’t notice for yourself.” She moved to him, stood inches from him. He leaned backward in mock concern. “Well I am,” she growled. “Because I married you.”
“Oh. Well. Of course.”
“In a minute I’m going to put your pie in the window cooler.” She sounded more than a little like Lauren Bacall in an old Bogart movie. “An hour and a half from now, you and I will polish it off, and after that we’ll polish off each other. The girls will be asleep by then.”
* * *
They did. Afterward, lying side by side, Lee said, “I did it again. After I get upset, I always need you to make love to me.”
He chuckled. “You know what they say.”
“What do they say?”
“Every cloud has a silver lining.”
She sat up and hit him with her pillow, not hard enough to start a pillow fight, then lay back down. “For about the thousandth time,” she said, “I find myself awed by my daughters. Our daughters. They’re an incredible mixture of the best aspects of children with the best aspects of adults.”