A Big Storm Knocked It Over by Laurie Colwin Page B

she’s going to England to stay with her old college friend Audra Llynch. She was afraid to tell us because she thought we’d be unhappy.”
    â€œAin’t that something,” Jane Louise said. “Well, my mother can be heartbroken.”
    â€œYour mother can say she’s heartbroken, but she and Charlie can go away to someplace hot and expensive,” Teddy said. “She can have a lovely vacation and torture you at the same time.”
    â€œMaybe they’ll all be heartbroken,” Jane Louise said.
    â€œListen,” said Teddy fiercely. “We’re all heartbroken. I’m heartbroken. Until I met you I never had a holiday I enjoyed.”
    Jane Louise gaped at him. She had never expected to hear such a naked declaration from her husband. He was eating his dinner as if he had not just said a momentous thing, but his face was grim. She stood up, took his fork away from him, and threw her arms around his neck.
    â€œFor God’s sake, Janey,” he said.
    â€œI don’t care,” Jane Louise said. She sat in his lap and pressed her lips against his neck and breathed him in. She could feel his neck pulse against her cheek. Her tears slid onto his collar. She knew he hated storms of emotion, but she needed to feel him close to her. She wanted to make up for everything: for the conflicts and loneliness of his childhood, for the year and a half he had spent, an only son, in Vietnam, racked with a free-floating guilt that his mother would be left alone. She wanted to wash away his awful feelings about his father and his half-sisters. How was she going to do this?
    As she sat, with her husband in her arms and his warm breath on her neck, she felt fragile and exhausted. How am I going to keep him cheered? she wondered. How could she, a person whose life had been far from settled, make him some nice, safe place in which to rest comfortably?
    A holiday away! Jane Louise imagined herself and Teddy alone in a hotel room, lying next to each other on a hotel bed, holding hands but not speaking. She imagined herself turning to her husband and watching the cloud of sadness she so dreaded rolling over him. She imagined them skating at an ice rink. Teddy on ice was as easy and secure as a bird. It was a natural element for him. She imagined them skating arm in arm—she was a pretty good skater, too—trying to skate away from the sense that they werealone and isolated at a time when people clung together with their loved ones.
    Jane Louise expressed this vision to her husband. He raised an eyebrow.
    â€œDo we know people who are happy to be in the bosom of their family?”
    â€œPeter and Beth,” Jane Louise said.
    â€œWell, let’s decode Peter and Beth,” Teddy said. “Beth’s family stopped speaking to her when she married Peter because he isn’t Catholic. They only got back together when the kids were born. She hates them, actually.”
    â€œWhy does she bother?”
    â€œIt’s a hunger,” Teddy said. “She wants the kids to have grandparents.”
    â€œThey have Peter senior and Laura.”
    â€œThose are Peter’s parents,” said Teddy. “Now let’s take Peter senior and Laura. On the one hand, it’s all very cozy, and they all live together in a small town, and Peter got such a great piece of land from his father, but Marjorie didn’t inherit a piece of land from her father, so now she takes dictation from horses. Peter’s glad he has the land, but he also has his father breathing down his neck. It’s nice in a small place. It’s also hell. It’s not like here. Here you don’t have to be careful every minute of offending someone or hurting his feelings and having the whole thing snowball. There it’s different. When Peter started farming without chemicals, Howard Vincent and Arnold Kingshot and Jack White took it as a slap in their face since they farm with