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Show 132 Rudy Kelly?" "Hon, you know Rudy cares. About us. And he loves the boys. You know that. You know he's dropped things. He's dropped important things whenever we've ..." It was another of Hunt's unfinished sentences. Leah was silent. "... Does he live next door?" she asked. And Hunt saw. "Does he wave, backing out of his driveway? Does he borrow wrenches?" She pinched the lids of her eyes. "God, I think I'd welcome even one unlit grape on the front mat tomorrow morning. And an unexploded caper!" "Let's have a costume party!" Hunt said. He smiled. It was a serious idea, one of Hunt's heartfelt, well-intentioned lunges. He wanted to fill Leah's pain of absence, provide whatever it was she was longing for. "Remember the Groates? Remember they did that? In New Hampshire? We'll begin again!" "You mean, begin again, again?" Leah rolled over and stared at her husband, Hunt: The Realist Painter. "Did you ever think . . .?" she asked. "Did you ever think that what you did in July was not . . . paint the neighbors at all, really - but paint them out?" If Leah had hated Hunt's paintings of the neighbors, she hated the money he received from them more. One noon, he caught her staring at the final sixteen-hundred-dollar check in its envelope on the marble sidetable as if it were a bankruptcy notice -- or a death certificate. "Hunt," she said to him: "Is it possible - could we get rid of all of this? Spend it somehow in a single afternoon? Waste it? Expel it? Is there a cathartic for Realism?" Hunt saw, that in his wife's mind, he had cut her from the world of others . . . |