"Not gone long enough, baby," he said as he gave her a mighty hug. With the delightedly squealing child in his arms, he leaned to kiss Mirelle warmly. "Miss me?"
"Now that you're home, I believe I have," she said, teasingly, knowing that he wouldn't deliberately misinterpret.
"Oh, yeah," and Steve ducked his head, suddenly remembering the way in which he had stormed out of the house three days earlier. "The bogeys are off my back, the stars in favorable conjunction, the weather superb, my reservations weren't snafued and I have more than enough large orders to please the bossmen and no problems to report."
"Momma's got a commission," Roman said.
Mirelle nodded affirmation.
"And she made the keenest soldier last night," Nick added.
"On account of she watched Combat with us," Tonia could always find a last word or two.
"Oh, off on another toot?" Steve asked, putting Tonia on her feet.
"Guess so," Mirelle said, keeping her voice as neutral as possible. She could have choked Roman for starting the subject. She'd wanted to introduce it more gently in privacy to judge how Steve was really taking the news.
"It paid the back bills last time. What're you aiming for this time, honey?"
With relief, Mirelle saw that he was not going to start off by resisting her work-urge. She would have troubles with him later, she always did, but once she got underway, her capacity for ignoring interruptions was unlimited. Steve had once compared her to a lady steamroller.
"Trim on the house could stand repainting. I'd love to get rid of that hall wallpaper. You said something about a new suit and snow tires…"
"All that with one commission?"
"You know me once I get started."
"Tonight?" he asked, slightly aggrieved.
"No." She grinned. "Tonight you and I will have some time to… talk." She raised her eyebrows, rolling her eyes suggestively.
"I'm hungry," he replied with a leer.
It was a happy dinner. Mirelle, feeling slightly guilty over having lunched out, had cooked a complicated casserole, a family favorite, for dinner. It had always been her policy to feed Steve well when he came in from a trip. Consequently, serving her family second helpings, she felt mellow and serene, instead of rebellious and frustrated.
It would be so much nicer, she thought as Steve and she sat over their coffee in the living room, if I could always time my work jags with successful road trips. But you can't have everything.
"Say, where's the soldier Tonia mentioned?" Steve asked suddenly.
"Oh, him? I've plastered."
"Without my seeing him? You only did him last night." Steve frowned.
"Well, you remember that marvelous deer…"
"Are you never going to forget that?"
"No," she replied tartly. "But you can scarcely blame me for wanting to avoid a repetition."
"No, I guess I don't blame you. Did you really use Caje as a model?"
"As much as anybody, I guess. It's the posture… you know, the broken-legged, sore-hipped, swung from the knee walk of the infantryman?"
"I always said," and Steve leaned back with a smug expression on his face, "you married me for that walk."
He bent over and kissed her.
"Why do we nag at each other, Mir?" he asked softly. "I love you, hon, but you get in one of your bitchy, untouchable moods and I'm teed off with those bastards on my tail, and we wind up at each other's throats like we hated."
Mirelle wondered if he was reading her mind.
"We've been married fifteen years, Steve. Perhaps we're just wearing away another level of petty irritations."
"Before we're deeper in the marriage rut?"
Mirelle was glad that she was serene inside or surely she would have bridled at that.
"Rut, schmut, so long as you love your wife."
"Get the kids sacked out early, will you?" he suggested, his eyes intense with desire.
"Don't you just know it!"
The next morning, because they had had the most satisfactory sex in months, Mirelle went through the business of tidying up the house, feeling slightly like Scarlett O'Hara. She loaded Steve's laundry into the washing machine and sorted out what had dried the previous day, before she allowed herself to pause in the studio.
The plaster cocoon on the soldier, now a formless blob, was cool under her hand. She envisioned it already cast in bronze but had no desire to finish plastering beyond the color coat. He was safe there, from curious fingers and eyes.
Idly she picked up her file of sketches, a rather awkward collection as she used whatever came to hand when she saw a face or a pose she liked. There were old deposit slips, shirt cardboards, programs, menus, even two match covers. She riffled through the file, selecting one or two for closer inspection, until she came to her original sketch for the Bronze Cat which Jamie Howell had admired.
She looked at it a long time, her mind's eye taking her beyond the two dimensions to her vivid recall of the finished statue. She had sculpted Tasso washing a paw, his tail carefully curved around his bottom, tail tip slightly raised. He had been sitting in the sun, she remembered, and he'd remained on the windowsill for a long time, just as if he realized that he was posing for posterity. After the session, when she'd stroked him, he'd arched his back under her hand, purring roughly. They had only been in the Spartanburg house for three weeks. Nick was an impossible yearling, Roman running wild and Mirelle was violently bitter at having been uprooted from Ashland. She'd been so happy there for she'd met Lucy Farnoll and there were few women like Lucy anywhere.
How much that sketch of Tasso evoked! Mirelle thought with a long sigh. Three weeks in a new location and already Tasso knew where the sun would be for his morning bath: where, aloof and contained, he could observe the neighborhood animals on their rounds. How she had envied that adaptable complacency. How horribly she had missed Lucy.
"Ah, she dwelt among the untrodden ways…" The verse popped into Mirelle's mind. How she and Lucy had laughed about it, the winter they were snowed in and the road to Lucy's house, set far back from the highway, had been impassable. They'd had to backpack supplies in.
Mirelle had actively hated Steve for accepting the trans fer from Ashland to Spartanburg. She certainly had railed at the Company, slamming in the vilest of tempers around the little new house which Steve had bought before she'd seen it. Steve had been tolerant with her for a long time. But that was before management had begun to pressure him. He'd been so keen, so eager: he'd lived enthusiastically and completely in his work so that he'd been able to regard her disillusion with detachment and tenderness.
Life in Ashland had been full for Mirelle: in Spartanburg, it was impossibly tedious. She knew no one and had never made friends easily under the best conditions. In Spartanburg, the full brunt of her natural introversion pressed her into a masochistic reclusion, and the care of two young children had left her with no energy at all for sculpting. In Ashland, Lucy had often taken Roman and Nick off her hands for a day or an afternoon, allowing Mirelle uninterrupted time to work. Lucy had understood completely Mirelle's compulsion to create and her conscientious devotion to her children. Lucy had talents of her own, being a poet whose work often appeared in the literary reviews as well as the slick women's magazines. Lucy maintained that if her husband, Fred, complained about her being lost in creative trances, he never complained when the checks came in. However, Mirelle was not blind to the fact that Lucy ran an exceedingly well-organized house, kept tabs on her four children in an off-handed manner, and lived up to every duty of marriage and motherhood. She could afford to tell her husband off. Mirelle felt no such freedom.
"I run like hell to stay in one place sometimes, cookie," Lucy said one day as Mirelle watched her bake three pies at once. "Now I freeze the other two and then, when I see the old man getting feisty, I shut off the growl at the stomach level. A tip I pass on to you at absolutely no extra charge. There are ways of working the jungle we call life, but don't you ever, ever leave off that," and Lucy pointed to a doughy fork in Mirelle's hands, restlessly forming minute animals out of scraps of pie dough. "God gave you stewardship over your talent. It's HIM you answer to, not that overgrown sex-addict who sleeps in your bed."