My back started killing me and Tamara asked what else did I want and why? Oddly, she was suddenly unenthusiastic about me and she revealed resentment, of all things, and possibilities for her revenge.
But how busy I was!—building the twelve-by-sixteen rec room at the rear of the house.
I made bedplates and cut boards. And this was the day that Tamara baked her standard sponge cake.
When I reached for a taste of the cake, she took the plate away.
So I slapped her and drilled holes for anchor bolts, used a shim to level bedplates and my half-inch nuts to secure the bedplates.
“Have I seen that before?” I asked her, for by then Tamara smoked a cigarette near the site and she was waving an arm on which slid—up and down—a bracelet of lumpy blue glass.
A beautiful beam of light—perhaps it was aqua—was produced by the sun poking through the dangles at her wrist.
And then again that woman behaved unfavorably toward me, for I had laid my hands on her small-sized, stooped back, or I had prodded her.
By the next May, Tamara had departed and Hesper, her replacement, carried a tray of old-time spring tonic for the two of us. Yet Hesper is so perfectly content to pursue me, seeing as how I expected she’d soon lose interest in the project or not have any real knack for it.
At this point we marched around the yard attentively, and I could tell from her remarks, and from how she laughed seriously, that I would not need to worry too much about her—as if I’d considered all of the pitfalls and avoided them.
There was a green glow from the thin, scratched surface of the lawn.
And there was that underlying melody when Hesper groaned because she saw the gopher hole—rather, we saw that typical mound of soil.
We had to set a cinch trap.
After you catch a gopher, you tap it headfirst, dead, right back into the hole! That’s good fertilizer.
This isn’t just a big joke. Pests move in from other areas and damage can occur in a short time from new ones who reinvade the world of nature.
But after I put to death a friendship, a marriage?
There are people to take their places, who move in from other areas, of course. There are people who are dedicated to the true good, who work toward this goal. There are animals that may not.