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of Axon regrets that it cannot offer you a larger fee. The company’s own product is in the earliest stages of testing, and there is no guarantee that its investment will bear fruit.

      If the terms outlined in the attached Licensing Agreement are acceptable, please sign and have notarized all three copies and return them to me no later than September 30.

      Sincerely yours,

      Joseph K. Prager

       Senior Associate Partner

       Bragg Knuter & Speigh

      When this letter had arrived in the mail in August and Enid had awakened Alfred in the basement, he’d shrugged and said, “Five thousand dollars won’t change the way we live.” Enid had suggested that they write to the Axon Corporation and ask for a larger fee, but Alfred shook his head. “We’ll have soon spent five thousand dollars on a lawyer,” he said, “and then where are we?” It didn’t hurt to ask, though, Enid said. “I will not ask,” Alfred said. But if he just wrote back, Enid said, and asked for ten thousand … She fell silent as Alfred fixed her with a look. She might as well have proposed that they make love.

      Denise had taken a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, as if to underline her indifference to a matter of consequence to Enid. Sometimes Enid believed that Denise had disdain for every last thing she cared about. The sexual tightness of Denise’s blue jeans, as she bumped a drawer shut with her hip, sent this message. The assurance with which she drove a corkscrew into the cork sent this message. “Do you want some wine?”

      Enid shuddered. “It’s so early in the day.”

      Denise drank it like water. “Knowing Gary,” she said, “I’m guessing he said try to gouge them.”

      “No, well, see—” Enid reached toward the bottle with both hands. “Just a tiny drop, pour me just a swallow, honestly, I never drink this early in the day, never—you see, but Gary wonders why the company is even bothering with the patent if they’re still so early in their development. I guess the usual thing is just to infringe on the other person’s patent. —That’s too much! Denise, I don’t like so much wine! Because, see, the patent expires in six years, so Gary thinks the company must stand to make a lot of money soon.”

      “Did Dad sign the agreement?”

      “Oh, yeah. He went over to the Schumperts’ and had Dave notarize it.” “Then you have to respect his decision.”

      “Denise, he’s being stubborn and unreasonable. I can’t—”

      “Are you saying this is an issue of competency?”

      “No. No. This is fully in character. I just can’t—”

      “If he already signed the agreement,” Denise said, “what is Gary imagining you’re going to do?”

      “Nothing, I guess.”

      “So what’s the point here?”

      “Nothing. You’re right,” Enid said. “There’s nothing we can do,” although in fact there was. If Denise had been a little less partisan in her support of Alfred, Enid might have confessed that after Alfred had given her the notarized agreement to mail at the post office on her way to the bank, she’d hidden the agreement in the glove compartment of their car, and had let the envelope sit and radiate guilt for several days; and that later, while Alfred was napping, she’d hidden the envelope more securely at the back of a laundry-room cabinet containing jars of undesirable jams and spreads going gray with age (kumquat-raisin, brandy-pumpkin, Korean barfleberry) and vases and baskets and cubes of florist’s clay too good to throw away but not good enough to use; and that, as a result of this dishonest act, she and Alfred could still extract a big licensing fee from Axon, and that it was therefore crucial that she locate the second, Registered letter from Axon and hide it before Alfred found out that she’d deceived and disobeyed him. “Oh, but that reminds me,” she said, emptying her glass, “there’s something else I really need your help with.”

      Denise hesitated before replying with a polite and cordial “Yes?” This hesitation confirmed Enid’s long-held belief that she and Alfred had taken a wrong turn somewhere in Denise’s upbringing. Had failed to instill in their youngest child the proper spirit of generosity and cheerful service.

      “Well, as you know,” Enid said, “we’ve gone to Philadelphia for the last eight Christmases in a row, and Gary’s boys are old enough now that they might like to have a memory of Christmas at their grandparents’ house, and so I thought—”

      “Damn!” came a cry from the living room.

      Enid set down her glass and hurried from the kitchen. Alfred was sitting on the edge of the chaise in a somehow penal posture, his knees high and his back a little hunched, and was surveying the crash site of his third hors d’oeuvre. The gondola of bread had slipped from his fingers on its approach to his mouth and plunged to his knee, scattering wreckage and tumbling to the floor and finally coming to rest beneath the chaise. A wet pelt of roasted red pepper had adhered to the chaise’s flank. Shadows of oil-soak were forming around each clump of olive morsels on the upholstery. The emptied gondola lay on its side with its yellow-soaked, brown-stained white interior showing.

      Denise squeezed past Enid with a damp sponge and went and knelt by Alfred. “Oh, Dad,” she said, “these are hard to handle, I should have realized.”

      “Just get me a rag and I’ll clean it up.”

      “No, here,” Denise said. Cupping one hand for a receptacle, she brushed the bits of olive from his knees and thighs. His hands shook in the air near her head as if he might have to push her away, but she did her work quickly, and soon she’d sponged the bits of olive up from the floor and was carrying the dirtied food back to the kitchen, where Enid had wanted a tiny extra splash of wine and in her hurry not to be conspicuous had poured a rather substantial tiny splash and downed it quickly.

      “Anyway,” she said, “I thought that if you and Chip were interested, we could all have one last Christmas in St. Jude. What do you think of that idea?”

      “I’ll be wherever you and Dad want to be,” Denise said.

      “No, I’m asking you, though. I want to know if it’s something you’re especially interested in doing. If you’d especially like to have one last Christmas in the house you grew up in. Does it sound like it might be fun for you?”

      “I can tell you right now,” Denise said, “there’s no way Caroline’s leaving Philly. It’s a fantasy to think otherwise. So if you want to see your grandkids, you’ll have to come east.”

      “Denise, I’m asking what you want. Gary says he and Caroline haven’t ruled it out. I need to know if a Christmas in St. Jude is something that you really, really want for yourself. Because if all the rest of us are agreed that it’s important to be together as a family in St. Jude one last time—”

      “Mother, it’s fine with me, if you think you can handle it.”

      “I’ll need a little help in the kitchen is all.”

      “I can help you in the kitchen. But I can only come for a few days.”

      “You can’t take a week?”

      “No.”

      “Why not?”

      “Mother.”

      “Damn!” Alfred cried again from the living room as something vitreous, maybe a vase containing sunflowers, hit the floor with a cracking-open sound, a gulp of breakage. “Damn! Damn!”

      Enid’s own nerves were so splintery she almost dropped her wineglass, and yet a part of her was grateful for this second mishap, whatever it was, because it gave Denise a small taste of what she had to put up with every day, around the clock, at home in St. Jude.

      The night of Alfred’s seventy-fifth birthday had found Chip alone at Tilton Ledge pursuing sexual congress with his red chaise longue.

      It

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