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pascal_curious) wrote2011-04-06 07:21 pm
Chapter 37 : Children of the Sun
Jenny Smith waved to her daughter, Jill, as the 10-year-old boarded the school bus. Jill found herself a seat and waved back to her mother through the window.
Jenny gave a deep sigh of relief as the bus pulled away from the house. She was so very tired. For a moment, she considered going back inside the house, plopping down on the sofa and indulging in a nice long nap. Can it still be called a nap if it is before eight in the morning, she wondered. Was there some unwritten rule on napping that said if you went back to sleep before a certain time in the morning it was laziness, and not napping? She sighed again and shrugged her shoulders. Whether it was napping or not, there was no time for it today.
She walked around the side of the house to the back yard where she knew she would find her husband. John was always up before the children, as soon as dawn broke, tending to his plants. She found him near the white picket fence that bordered their yard. The whole length of the fence at the far end of their property was lined with sunflowers.
The sunflowers were his favorite, and he often spent hours on end plucking, pruning, spraying, and talking to them. Jenny loved to listen to him talk to his flowers. He talked to his plants like a mother would talk to her infant. He would whisper and croon silly endearments to them. It always made her giggle. Her husband was such a wonderful, dear, quirky man. She couldn’t imagine what her life might have been had she never met him.
She walked across the yard to join him. He was whispering childish nonsense to one of the smaller blooms as he plucked away withered petals.
She slid her arm around his waist and gave him a squeeze. He put his arm around her shoulders and they stood together silently, drinking in the beauty of their surroundings.
Jenny could see her brothers’ bunker at the top of the hill. The bunker had a perfect view over the small desert valley that was Strangetown. Buying the empty lot across the street from their old family home had been a strike of genius. Pascal now owned one of the most valuable pieces of property in town.
In the years since the bunker was built, a development company snatched up the remaining lots on the hill and built great hideous monstrosities.
Now, in the recession, those homes stood empty with faded for-sale signs on the lawns. On a clear day the Smiths could see anything that was going on at the bunker, and the residents of the bunker could see down into the Smith’s back yard. When Johnny, Jenny and John’s son, was a little boy he never tired of signaling to his uncles using semaphore. Lazlo had taught the boy semaphore, and they told each other bad jokes using the signal flags. Jenny almost laughed aloud as she remembered her son rolling around in the grass in fits of laughter after a particularly awful joke from his Uncle Lazlo. Now Johnny was grown, and going off to college in the fall. He hadn’t played with the semaphore flags in years. He was almost a man and didn’t have time to be a silly little boy any longer.
John gave his wife a squeeze and a kiss. He held her in his arms and she laid her head on his chest.
“I’m going to miss him too,” John said quietly.
“Huh,” asked Jenny as she looked up into his dark eyes.
“I’ll miss him too, when he goes off to college.”
Jenny sometimes forgot that her husband had an uncanny ability to know exactly what she was thinking about. He wasn’t always right, but most of the time he was.
“He’s not around very much as it is,” she lamented, “I suppose it won’t be that much to get used to.”
There was a comfortable silence as they stood, holding each other among the sunflowers.
“Your sunflowers are so beautiful this year,” she told him after a few peaceful minutes. “Not like last year.”
“I’ll never do that again,” he said. “It was awful. I’ll never forget the look of those sad little flowers.”
The previous year John had performed a little experiment with his beloved sunflowers. Jill came home from school one afternoon in tears. The other children had been teasing her because her father talked to plants. They had been calling her every manner of plant name they could come up with. Crazy Daisy, Jungle Jill, Dozy Rose, and Loony Lily were just a few. To prove to his daughter that talking to plants really did make them grow bigger and stronger, he had separated his sunflowers into two groups. One group was tended and talked to as they always had been. The other group was tended, but otherwise ignored, and never spoken to. Much to Jill’s surprise, the flowers that he father crooned and whispered to flourished and boomed into bright, enormous blossoms. The plants that had been so cruelly ignored were squat and small and generally miserable looking specimens. Jill had been so impressed by her father’s experiment that she used it for a science project. She received an A on her project and more than a few of her classmates took up the hobby of speaking to houseplants (at least for a short while, anyway, until their parents were driven to distraction and asked them to stop). In a perfect world, the teasing would have stopped then and there. The teasing didn’t altogether stop, but it did taper off to a level where Jill could tolerate it. Meanwhile, her father fretted over the fate of his poor neglected plants. By the time he had proven his point, it was too late to do much of anything for them. The growing season was over, and all he could do was wait for them to wither and dry, and then harvest their seeds. The guilt still ate at him. He vowed he would never do anything so cruel to a plant again.
“Never again,” he assured his beloved sun-children.
“When I was a girl, I always thought sunflowers looked kind of alien, like they didn’t come from this world.” Jill told him. They are so large, and they almost look like a giant brown eye surrounded by yellow lashes. One year mother grew some in a planter on the porch. I avoided them like the plague. I always felt like they were watching me.”
“Silly girl,” John said as he gently caressed her cheek. “But you didn’t come out here to talk about flowers did you?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Normally, you would be inside cleaning up the breakfast mess. I know you very well, my dear wife, and I am quite aware of the fact that you are as fastidious as Felix Unger. Only something really important would cause you to leave dirty dishes on the table for longer than a millisecond.”
Jenny smiled at him. Of course he was correct. He seemed to know her better than she knew herself. She took his hands in hers and drew a deep breath. Here goes…
“I’m pregnant,” she blurted.
John smiled at her. “I know.”
“You know?”
John nodded. He was still smiling.
“How did you…I mean, how long have you known?”
“Since the moment you conceived.”
“But how?” she asked. She didn’t honestly think that he could have known. But then again…
“You forget, I am much attuned to human hormone levels. It used to be my job.”
“So you have known for the last two months, and you didn’t say anything to me?” she asked, incredulous.
“I didn’t want to rob you of that joyous moment when you found out. That wouldn’t be fair, would it? Doesn’t every woman want to have that short while when she is the only one who knows, and she can revel in the idea that she has a wonderful secret that no one else in the world knows?”
Jenny looked at her husband for a moment, not sure what to say. It suddenly dawned on her that if he knew when she had conceived this time, then…
“Did you know with Johnny and Jill too?”
He nodded. “Johnny was conceived when we took that day tip to the mountains and had a romantic little picnic.” He tapped his fingers on his lips and thought for a moment. “I don’t think Jill happened on any special occasion, but I think it was in March, and you had a particularly bad day at work, so I made you dinner and took you to bed early. I remember that you were very distressed over something, but you wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
Jenny had been married to her husband for eighteen years, and there were still moments when he completely amazed her.
“You are happy, then?” she asked.
“Very. But you are a little frightened, aren’t you?”
Jenny tried very hard not to break into tears. “I’m old!” she cried.
John laughed at her and stroked her hair. “You’re not old. You are only thirty-seven.”
“But I’m too old to be having a baby! My eggs are old! What if there’s something wrong with the baby? I should have been more careful,” she sobbed into his sweater.
“There’s nothing wrong with the baby, and your eggs are nowhere near their expiration date. You don’t have anything to worry about, I promise.”
“You’re always so sure about everything, but how can you be sure about this,” she demanded to know.
“You’ve always trusted me before, please trust me on this. You have nothing to worry about and I swear to you that I will tell you if you do.”
Jenny knew she could trust her husband; he had never let her down yet. It helped that he was something of an expert on human pregnancy, but it was more the look of sincerity on his face that eased her mind …about the pregnancy, at least.
“But what will we do about money? I’ll have to take maternity leave, and we won’t have my income to rely on. How will we be able to keep up on the bills?” She glared at the lush green lawn, remembering their last water bill.
John smiled and kissed her forehead. “You don’t have to worry about that either, I promise you. Everything will be just fine. My pension will more than provide all that we need, especially if we are having another child.”
“What do you mean ‘if we are having another child’? How would that make a difference?”
John had never told his wife many details about his work. That was by her choice, not his. Jenny chose not to know the particulars about her husband’s former occupation. She understood the basics of what it was to be a Pollination Technician. She had decided she would probably be better off not knowing the whos, hows, and whys of it all.
“For every child I sire, through traditional or scientific means, I receive an increase in my monthly pension payment. I was luck that I was grandfathered in because of my many years of service. I hear they don’t use those guidelines any longer.”
“You didn’t get me pregnant just to increase your income did you?” Jenny demanded to know.
John frowned.
“I really hope you didn’t mean that. I promised you when we got married I would never use my skills to manipulate the odds of your conceiving unless you asked me to. I have kept that promise. Each and every time it has been by pure luck. Besides, I really have to concentrate to determine where you are in your cycle. With the work I did we rarely had to concern ourselves with menstrual cycles. I think there have only ever been a handful of women pollinated. Usually it happened by accident. The pilot would bring up a woman by mistake and we pollinated her rather than just sending her back and wasting the trip and the supplies.”
Jenny felt guilty for having asked the question. She knew John was a man to keep his word. It must have hurt him when she asked that.
“I’m sorry, John. I really didn’t mean it. You know I trust you.” She hugged her husband tightly. “I think it was just the hormones talking.”
“You’re forgiven,” he told her, “you must have forgotten that I’ve dealt with CPLS before.”
“CPLS?” she asked.
“Crazy Pregnant Lady Syndrome,” he said with a wink.
Jenny laughed.
“You’re right. I did forget.”
They stood silently for a few minutes before another question occurred to Jenny.
“I was thinking. If it’s a girl we could name her Kathleen, after my mother. What do you think?”
“I think that would be a perfect name… if it is a girl.”
“You can’t tell what I am going to have, can you?”
John couldn’t help grinning mischievously. “Would you like to know?” he asked.
Jenny thought for a moment. It would be nice to know so she could be more prepared, but it was more fun to be surprised.. She hadn’t known when Johnny and Jill were born. It took her a moment to decide.
“I don’t want to know.”
“Are you sure? I can tell you right now, if you like.”
Jenny couldn’t help notice the uncharacteristically wide grin her husband was wearing.
“I’m sure. Don’t tell me anything. Nothing at all.”
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Haven't done anything with them, myself, but I have always pictured John coming to see Glarn to check up on his progeny...then seeing the 18 or so year old Jenny and being bowled over by her.
Lovely job with the whole "couple who has been happily married a long time" dynamic - that one can be hard to do effectively.
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I was hpoing that I got the "Happily Married" thing well enough. I don't have any experience in that department.
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I only have about a decade of experience there, myself, so I'm always hesitant to try and write it. My foster parents had been married for 55 years when my foster dad passed, though, so at least I have seen it.
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(Although I did get a kick out of the semaphore part, for some reason. xD)
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