All That Outer Space Allows (Apollo Quartet Book 4) by Ian Sales Read Free Book Online Page A

standing in which he is held by his current employers.
    I guess that’s everything, Mrs Eckhardt? says the contractor.
    He pulls open the driver’s door to his truck, and now Ginny can’t see the name emblazoned on it because she’s just come up blank, her head full of story, of an image of herself standing at the stove, and superimposed over it, a ghostly overlay, another woman in some future fashion—perhaps a dress made of small white plastic discs which shimmer and clack when she moves, Ginny thinks she saw something like it in Vogue , which of course she does not read herself, it must have been in the beauty parlour, or perhaps when visiting Pam or Mary or Dotty or Joan—
    And so she gives another bright smile, puts a hand up to adjust her sunglasses and says, yes, yes, of course, thank you so much.
    The contractor holds out a hand to shake, and she looks down at it, briefly disconcerted, and then takes it, his rough workman’s hand enfolding her own with the painted nails she has yet to get used to—the time it takes to keep them shaped and polished!—she feels like she should be a completely different person, not the Ginny whose body she has been inhabiting these thirty years but another person, weak and frail, with her soft red-nailed hands, powder and paint, pantyhose and heels.
    It’s all part of the astronaut package. The past few months of parties, the press gatherings, even the television appearance, at all of which her husband has been dutifully accessorized with her, and she has remained polite and noncommittal—but enthusiastic about space, NASA and Walden—they have been exciting times, intoxicating even, after their years of exile in the desert. And the money she has spent so she can look the part! Walden has his new car, but when he demands to know where all the money is going he is blind to the fact she’s wearing a new outfit.
    Ginny tells herself all this is fair payment so the man she loves can do what he so dearly wishes to do: go into space, perhaps one day walk on the Moon; but in her increasingly more frequent self-critical moments she knows she’s only fooling herself, making the charade palatable. For the possibility of Walden on the lunar surface, she will keep herself “pretty”, she will dress like the other astronaut wives, she will be thrilled, happy and proud.
    And smile until her jaws ache from the hypocrisy of it all.
    #
    Months later, Ginny will regret her moment of inattention when she learns she apparently agreed to something she doesn’t recall. Walden is furious and believes the contractor unilaterally decided it for himself, but Ginny, if only to deflect his rage, admits it may have been her fault, she had misunderstood or misheard the man. In time, they’ll come to appreciate the contractor’s choice, but for now it sours their pride in their new house, which Ginny feels is only fair since the pride seems to be mostly Walden’s—as if he built the house himself, as if he personally oversaw its construction. She hasn’t the heart to tell him she apparently used the “wrong” contractor, not the one the other astronauts used, and some of the wives have been unpleasant to her about it. That sours her sense of achievement.
    It doesn’t help that days after breaking ground on the plot in El Lago Walden and Ginny had bought, Gus, Roger and Ed die in a fire in the Apollo 1 command module. Ginny, who knows Betty, Martha and Pat only passingly as fellow members of the AWC, like all of the wives feels the deaths keenly because it seems a tragedy she believed the best of science and engineering worked to guard them against; but now all of their husbands are hostages to the same fickle fortune—and the fact none of them has been able to take out life insurance becomes suddenly and horrifyingly and heart-breakingly relevant and real . It’s not simply the all too imaginable prospect of a future without their husbands which stabs so deeply, but a stripping from them of