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Arthur is eighty-five years old. He guesses he does want to live to be one hundred, even without Nola. It’s not the same without her, though. Not one thing is the same. Even something as simple as looking at a daffodil, as he is doing now—someone has planted double-flowered daffodils at the base of a nearby headstone. But seeing that daffodil with Nola gone is not the same, it’s like he’s seeing only part of it.
Everybody has thoughts that shame them. You can’t control them coming in. But you don’t have to let them all out. That’s the crux of it. That’s what made for civilization, what was left of it, anyway.
People who don’t feel cared for are not always comfortable being cared for.
He changes his shirt and combs his hair, inspects his teeth. As he’s going out the door, he tells Gordon, “I’ll be back. Guard the house. Shoot if necessary.” The cat yawns. “You don’t exactly inspire confidence,” Arthur says.
Nola used to get perturbed with his quiet. “Oh!” she’d say, sometimes. “I just wish you’d make yourself a little livelier!” Once when she said that, it was at dinner and he rose up from the table, took in a deep breath, and yodeled good and loud for a full half minute. And Nola stared at him in amazement. “I didn’t know you knew how to yodel!” she said. And he said, “Now you do.” “Why didn’t I know you could yodel?” she asked, and he said it didn’t really come up that much, the need to yodel.
Life is such a funny thing. It’s so funny. So arbitrary-seeming, but sometimes he just can’t help but think that there really is a grand plan. In a way, it reminds him of square dancing, how you can see the pattern fully only by looking at it from above, by not being a part of it.
