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Show -316 if we made the wrong choices he wouldn't love us any more. That's Jacob's problem now-he's been desperate to be respectable all his life, but a serious part of him is certain that respectability and success are the goals of a mediocre man." "You Skinners," Morgan said. "I never knew anybody who could brood so much. If the past was an egg you'd hatch it." "It hatched," I said. "Here we are to prove it." As we walked to our plane it began to rain harder; I fastened my seat-belt and watched the drops being whipped along my window as we accelerated down the runway. A minute later we nosed up through the overcast; soon we were sailing at a serene altitude high above the earth, under a bright sun. Below us was an immobile rolling landscape of pure white cloud. I lost myself in a child's fantasy of flying over fields after a fresh snow; I leaned my forehead against the window, my mind as blank as that brilliant bumpy cloud-scape, hearing nothing but the faint hiss of air moving at fatal speed just on the other side of the doubled glass. Without my willing it a memory came, of myself sitting on Linda's lap while she read aloud out of a picture book in which angels sat casually in just this sort of sky. Blond angels with haloes cocked above their heads like polished brass plates. |