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Show home. Three-quarters of an hour later I was hanging in the sky halfway between Los Angeles and Oregon, emotionally stranded. She touched my hand. "Buck?" "Yes?" "You're very sad about your father, aren't you?" "Yes." What I felt was a sort of feverish pity and terror, but maybe this was what grief was supposed to be. I touched the piece of yellow paper in my pocket: ADAM DROWNED. COME HOME. CARLO. I felt hotly mortal, in a fever to be dead. There was anger in me somewhere too. Morgan was my girl but I didn't know if I loved her; we weren't sure about each other. We had lived together for nearly four years and couldn't make up our minds; every now and then one of us left, but he always came back and the other was glad. She was a big, solidly-built girl, and she was temperamental, spooky, always ready to fight. I brought her along because of family feeling, maybe; she was nearly one of us by now. Certainly she had the Skinner temper. "You told me you weren't close to your father," she said. "That's right. So why am I feeling so bad, then?" I hadn't meant to growl; people turned around in their seats to look at us. "It's as much of a mystery to me as it is to you," I said. "Family feeling is one hell of a complicated thing." |