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Show •308 down. I winked to tell him everything was all right. Perhaps I'm laying an unfair burden on him, I thought, but right now nobody else can do this. My life in Los Angeles was a succession of one-bedroom apartments with furniture from Abbey Rents, not suitable for Carlo. Morgan might have been some help but she wasn't going to be there now. The kid needed stability until he could come to terms, and for that there was at this moment only Jacob. I smiled at him and nodded' again by way of encouragement. That peculiar seaside light fell on all five of us and removed us from daily life; it seemed to turn us into a painting called Family Picnic, a great romantic Dutch treat, rich somber and meaningful. It was probably one symptom of my being a kid at heart that for me the world sometimes lapsed into such pictures, full of the mysterious meaning that the superior artist can give to an ordinary scene. I didn't do it on purpose at all; things just focused and froze like that, and all I could do was stop and admire the sudden false richness, the glow. Alice, personally a sour woman, baked sweet-tasting cakes, perhaps to make up for the lack of sweetness in herself. The lemon icing of this one was further sprinkled with little silver balls that cracked between my teeth like sugary bullets. Everybody but me had finished eating; I was slow because I was thinking. I looked up and saw that Carlo |