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Show -58 with faith in life and the best intentions in the world, set about making each other miserable. Mostly my fault, I see it clearly now. I was looking for a certain foundation to my life-a firm bottom to build on, and I found it but it turned out not to be what I wanted after all. Mary-Ellen thought she was marrying a hustler, a Snopes, a young Ben Franklin, someone like Maybelle's friend Benbow the car-dealer, who came to Tucson with nothing in his pocket but a few pennies and within four years bought out the man who gave him a job. I wanted to be that man and tried to reform myself under her direction, but something demonic deep down in me refused to go along with the joke. For which, when I looked at myself that morning in Adam's kitchen: twenty-seven years old, owning none of the things that go to make a man in snakepit America-no steady job, no house, no wife, no children of my own-I was a little sorry. But then I thought about 3enbow. I met him later at one of Maybelle's parties, and though we were interrupted before I had a chance to find out for sure, I don't think he was a happy man. Jacob shook my arm. "Are you falling asleep, Buck?" "What? No, no." Through the glass doors that opened on the garden I could see the bare beginnings of another day. "I was thinking," I said. "About Adam?" |