(7)

Grace and Owen didn’t sleep well. Usually it was just one of them moving around all night, disturbing the other with bed impressions and bathroom noises, but Owen went to the toilet half a dozen times and Grace woke at 3 worrying too much to return to sleep.

She fretted about Jenny’s rash. About Jeff’s and Jenny’s weight, and Jeff’s blood pressure. Linda’s disinterest in dating. Linda’s disinterest in hair color. The challenge of Mark. She regretted that Jeff would never be a father. Finally she fell back on what she did best: plan. She voiced a conclusion at 5:05.

“Let’s leave.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s get out of here today. You saw the weather report last night. They’re not expecting any sun for a week. This is depressing. And I miss Linda and Mark. Let’s visit them. We’ve got so many miles we can even go business class.”

“But we haven’t seen the Museum of Modern Art. And what about the baseball game?”

“C’mon, Owen. You know we won’t be happy here. Let’s go see the kids.” One of the strongest agreements in their marriage was about always vacationing together. Grace taught both children the importance of that, and sleeping in the same bed, which is why she found it surprising that Jeff and Jenny sometimes went their separate visiting ways, and often, because of the heat or his snoring, slept in different rooms. Kids don’t listen. She taught Linda about the importance of finding a mate who loves you just a little bit more than you love him, but that advice seemed to be ignored as well.

Owen’s face got that sappy romantic look that Grace found unappealing. But he said “Maybe I can take Mark to a game,” and she knew he was on board with the new plan. She picked up the phone and started making arrangements.

They managed to get a 1 o’clock flight to Denver. The sun broke through the clouds and the forecast at 10 that morning, and the city opened up from gray and white to blue and gold. Both Grace and Owen felt a little wistful in the shuttle to the airport, blinking behind their sunglasses at the perfect June light.

(8)

Linda had an arrangement. She refused to call it a date. She’d be accompanying Vern, the new member of the book group, to the Denver opera on Saturday night. Her comments about Bel Canto had been well received the night before, but what he had to say was more interesting. It turned out that Vern-the-plumber not only had an advanced degree in literature; he was an opera buff, and his notes were well-organized. The whole group got opera information which enhanced their understanding of the book.

Vern had season opera tickets and no partner. Linda was sure there was a story in that. He said he always either found a friend, or sold the other ticket, or donated it back to the opera company to resell. Linda had never seen an opera and Vern offered her the other ticket. She probably should have just paid him for it, but she said she’d buy them dinner and now they were making a long evening of it.

It wasn’t a date. Not only was Linda not looking, but Vern appeared maybe gay and at least unattractive. He was tall enough but bony thin, and the truth was that Linda liked bulk. He was extremely fastidious and appeared repressed. He sat with his long legs crossed at the knee and his arms folded over his narrow chest. His laugh and his sneeze were inhibited. His eye contact was rarely direct and never flirtatious.

But he was interesting. Very well educated. And he appeared to be the most considerate man she’d ever met. She was thinking about this opera deal more than she wanted to. She was distracted from a pile of work she really needed to do.

She heard Mark enter the house. She glanced at the time display on her computer screen and couldn’t believe the morning was already gone. She’d better prepare Mark for the imminent arrival of her parents.

“So how was it today?” she asked about his summer school class before she even entered the kitchen. She was as often surprised when she saw him; he’d grown about six inches in the last year and looked enough like Jeff to be his son instead of his nephew.

“Fantastic.”

“Again? This is quite the teacher.”

“Mom, I don’t know if he’ll ever stop. He’s got me thinking about math in a completely different way. I mean, it just occurred to me today that if I want and I work at it, I can actually invent some math myself.”

“Really?” Linda was going to start making lunch but she sat down with interest.

“Yeah. Mr. Chapelle got us talking today about arithmetic. It didn’t take much for us to see that adding is just a trick to count fast, and multiplying is a trick to add fast. It turns out that when you change stuff to exponents, you multiply by adding, which is another trick to speed up calculations. See? That’s what math is: tricks to go faster. You build the latest trick on the one before, like video games and computer programs.”

“Wow. So what I’m hearing is that you understand the organics of math. The way it’s really organized.”

Mark gave her a sweet look. “Exactly. So then we were talking and Mr. Chapelle drew a blob thing and asked us how we’d compute its area. It wasn’t a polygon or a circle or even an oval, so I thought about it and finally I said that if we put a grid over it, with really small squares, and then we added up the areas of all the squares that roughly matched the shape, then we’d have at least a close approximation of it. And Mr. Chapelle said I’d just described calculus! Isn’t that awesome?”

“It’s great. And I am so proud of you! That was really bright reasoning.”

“Thanks. Mr. Chapelle says next week we’re going to talk about the guts of computers. We’re going to speak binary. And learn something called hexadecimal…”

“I want to meet this Mr. Chapelle.”

“He said something about a party at the end of class.”

“Good. Meanwhile, I have news for today. Grandma and Grandpa are on the way to visit.”