Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Read Free Book Online

the shed. Pulled by a garden tractor, the kids rode out into the rows of vines and came back with pumpkins on their laps. Marcus and his wife had had no children of their own.
    Bit by bit Meg got all this out of him. The computer on the table had belonged to his wife, who had left so fast she didn’t even take it, and one day he had been just fiddling with it and
somehow run across Lali’s service, DataMate. He didn’t realize, as Meg did, that the site must have been something his wife had bookmarked. Later Meg had Lali look for his wife around the matchmaking sites, but Lali didn’t find her.
    â€œGoodbye, Marcus,” Meg said. Goodbye. She felt she had known this man for many years, getting only as far in that time as she had in this one evening. It was all she could do not to offer him the friendship of e-mail, or a phone check-in. But something in his sealed lips kept her still.
    The candles he had made were mud-colored things hardened in orange juice cans, from the melted stumps of other candles. There were so many on the windowsills and arrayed on the tablecloth and on the top of the refrigerator that she saw the candle-making was not a hobby but a tether to action, active life, life.
    He had a lot of money available to him, and a college degree. How did she know? He told her. She had a sense of the complete truth of everything he claimed. He had been selling off prime land, but there was enough of it left, good grazing land, to lease to his neighbor while he was making up his mind what he was going to do. The sun had gone down but there was still light. Following her into the field of deep, wet grass to her car, he pointed out the driveway she could have taken, a few yards from where she had parked. She rolled her window down and said, “It was a lovely sunset.”
    â€œDawn’s where you see the real color.” He punched a thumb at the mountains across the road, and then he faded back into the semidark as she backed and turned and waved. Finally he too waved and walked off in the direction of the fence where they had seen the horses.
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    THE SECOND ONE She met on the sidewalk in front of a café on The Ave, the main drag in the University District. This time
Lali was there to make the introduction, and when she was gone they went in and sat drinking coffee for half the day.
    What did he look like?
    Why did we keep asking this question? Because as her parents it was the first thing we could think of to ask. He too was tall. Tall and thin. Something in the way she said this made Sam ask how tall. Six feet, six inches.
    â€œThat’s tall,” Sam said. After a minute he said, “Does he have long arms?” He did. “Long legs?” He did. “Long fingers? Really long?” Sam said, holding his palm out an inch from his own fingertips. Long. “Well,” Sam said, “I doubt you looked into his mouth to see if he has a high-arched palate.”
    â€œWhat are you getting at, honey?” I said. Sam is a doctor who likes to make deductions from physical description. When his sister and her husband visited, Sam made a bet that the lump they kept talking about in their German shepherd’s neck was not cancer but a benign nerve-sheath tumor, and after the biopsy they called up delighted, as if he had been the one to spare the dog.
    â€œMarfan’s syndrome,” Sam said.
    Our daughter had no interest in Marfan’s syndrome. To our dismay, however, she did seem interested in this young man, who, it turned out, had been living in a University District rooming house while job-hunting, but had been evicted, and had not yet found a place to live, even though he now had money in hand that his parents had wired. His name was Kevin and he was several years younger than Meg. For two nights he had slept in the open, getting to know the residents of Ravenna Park, who had befriended and sheltered him like the fairies who built the house around the girl,