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Show -57 between husbands, she was a ferry-pilot and flew 3-17 bombers from California to England. Twice left a widow by Arizona cattlemen who lacked her stamina, she had inherited several thousand acres of sage and sand north of Bisbee and west of Tombstone. The plan was for me to go to real estate school and take charge of selling her holdings a quarter-acre at a time to despairing railway clerks and retired high-school teachers from Chicago and the Eastern Seaboard, enriching Maybelle further and making me a man of consequence, fit to be her niece's husband. Mary-Ellen and I honeymooned at the Grand Canyon, in a motel perched on the edge of the cliffs; our room had a jingly brass bed and we made it chime with love's melodies. In the evening we left our knotty-pine nest to eat hamburgers in the motel coffee-shop and watch purple sunsets and the day's final gleam on the skinny ribbon of the Colorado, so far down. We came back and bought a house on the north side of Tucson, on Campbell Avenue, under the barren peaks of the Catalinas. Maybelle gave us the down payment on my promise to become a real estate man and better myself for her niece's sake. We had a gravel driveway, a sagging carport, a dirt yard, a solitary Saguaro cactus afflicted with dry rot and cactus wrens; out back on a concrete pad stood an old washing machine hooked to two rusty pipes. There Mary-Ellen and I, |