Regina’s Song. David Eddings

      “Why don’t I take you out to dinner instead?”

      “That’d be nice.”

      “I’ll take a shower and change clothes. I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes, OK?”

      “Anything you say, Markie.”

      I realized that I’d been neglecting Twink for the past few days. I’d been busy, of course, but that was no real excuse.

      I took her to a Chinese restaurant, and we pigged out on sweet-and-sour pork. Then we sat over tea and talked until the restaurant closed. Twinkie seemed relaxed and even quite confident. She was coming right along.

      I was certain that I’d finish up the shelves and the painting on Friday, so I’d only have one more night in the motel before I’d be able to settle into my own room.

      I got up fairly early and started painting as soon as I got to the Erd-lund house. I wanted the paint to be good and dry before I moved in my furniture.

      James stuck his head in through the doorway about noon. “Baby blue,” he noted.

      “I’m just a growing boy,” I replied.

      “Sure, kid. Who’s this Charlie guy the girls are all up in the air about?”

      “He’s an aerospace engineer who works for Boeing. His hobby is cars, and that made the Erdlund girls wiggle like puppies.”

      “Is Boeing really paying him to go to school? Or is he just blowing smoke in everybody’s ears?”

      “I think he’s giving us the straight scoop. He’s a sort of slob who quotes obscure passages from Shakespeare and knows more about the Italian Renaissance than you’d expect from an engineer. He’s a sharp one, that’s for sure. He’ll be moving in on Monday, and then you can judge for yourself.”

      “Nobody ever offered to buy me an education.”

      “We’re in the wrong fields, James.”

      “It looks like you’re almost finished,” he observed.

      “Three more shelves on top, then it’s all done.”

      “Do you really have that many books?”

      “Not quite, but I’m giving myself room for expansion. When you major in English, your library grows like a well-watered weed. I’ll get those last few shelves installed as soon as I finish painting. I want to polish it all off before the local U-Haul place closes. I’ll rent a truck this afternoon and bag on up to Everett first thing tomorrow morning.”

      “I’ll go along,” he rumbled. “Loading furniture into a truck is a two-man job.”

      “I was sort of hoping you might make that offer,” I said, grinning at him.

      “Have you got everything up there all packed?”

      “It’s ready to roll.” Then I went back to painting.

      I finished up by midafternoon, and then I went to the U-Haul place and rented a truck.

      James and I got an early start the next morning. It was Saturday, and of course it was raining. It always rains on weekends, or had you noticed? Monday through Friday can be sunny and bright, but come Saturday, you get rain. James and I talked a bit on the way north, and James told me that he’d started at the university after his wife had died of cancer. “I needed something to distract me,” he said rather shortly. He clearly didn’t want to go into any greater detail.

      There was an awkward silence for a while as we drove past Lynnwood through the steady drizzle.

      “What got you into English, Mark?” he asked finally.

      “Dumb luck, probably.” I launched into a description of my years at the community college and my early major in “everything.”

      “You sound like a throwback to the Renaissance—Mark da Vinci, maybe, or possibly Mark Borgia.”

      “It was an interesting time, that’s for sure. Isn’t that an old Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”

      “I seem to have heard that.”

      “I was just dabbling, James,” I explained. “I wasn’t even working toward a degree—I took courses in anything that sounded interesting. What got you into philosophy?”

      He shrugged. “The usual stuff—’The meaning of life,’ or the lack thereof.” He seemed to hesitate a moment. “It’s none of my business, but how is it that a young fellow who works for a living came to own a house? That usually doesn’t come along until quite a bit later.”

      “It’s an inheritance,” I told him. “My folks were killed in a car accident, and there was some mortgage insurance involved in the estate.”

      “Ah,” he said and let the matter drop.

      We reached my house in north Everett, and I backed the truck up to the front porch. Then we hauled out my furniture and box after box of my books. Books aren’t quite as heavy as salt, but they come close. James and I were both sweating heavily by the time we finished up. “Now I see why you needed so much shelf space,” he observed.

      “Tools of the trade,” I said. “I guess I’m one of the last precomputer scholars, so my books take up lots of room—which is fine with me. When I read something, it’s on a real page, not a monitor. No hysteria about rolling blackouts.”

      I had to shift my emotions into neutral as I made a quick survey of the now-empty house—I didn’t want to start blubbering.

      “Tough, isn’t it?” James said sympathetically.

      “More than a little. I grew up here, so there are all sorts of memories lurking in the corners. There’s a big cherry tree in the backyard, and the Twinkie Twins used to spend hours up in that tree eating cherries and squirting the pits at me.”

      “Squirting?”

      “You put a fresh cherry pit between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze. If you do it right, the pit zips right out. The twins thought that was lots of fun. It was a summer version of throwing snowballs.”

      “You have twin sisters?”

      “Not exactly. They were the daughters of my dad’s best buddy.”

      “Were?”

      I hesitated for a moment. The story was almost certain to come out eventually anyway, so there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it. “One of them was murdered a few years ago. The other one went a little crazy after that and spent some time in a private sanitarium. Now she’s starting to come out of it—sort of. She’s staying with her aunt down in Wallingford—about five blocks from our place. Her headshrinker thinks that going to college might help her.”

      “I’m not sure that U.W.’s the best place to go looking for mental stability,” James noted, as I locked the front door.

      “Her aunt and I will be keeping a fairly tight grip on her,” I told him. Then we closed and latched the back door of the U-Haul van and climbed into the cab.

      “You seem to be quite involved with this surviving twin,” James said rather carefully.

      “There’s none of that kind of thing going on, James,” I told him, starting the engine. “The Twinkie twins were like baby sisters to me, and once you’ve seen a girl in messy diapers, you’re not likely to have romantic thoughts about her. I’ve just always looked out for them.”

      “Twinkie Twins?”

      “In-house joke.” I admitted. “Nobody could tell them apart, so I got everybody started indiscriminately calling them both ‘Twink.’ They pretty much stopped being Regina and Renata and started being Twink and Twink.”

      “I’ll bet