Lost Boys

8: Shrink

This is how it happened that Step found a psychiatrist for Stevie, even though he had vowed that he would never take his son to one of those charlatans.

Not that Step had anything against psychiatrists individually. Their best friends in grad school in Vigor had been Larry and Sheila Redmond; Larry was a fellow history student, while Sheila was just starting a private practice as a psychotherapist. Step had made himself obnoxious, teasing her about how she had gone into the ministry. "The only difference between psychotherapists and ministers is that psychotherapists charge more, and more people believe in their brand of miracle cure."

Sheila took it all in good humor-after all, patience was the mark of a good therapist-and, because of her, Step had to admit to himself that even though he thought all psychological theories were nothing more than competing sects in a secular religion of self-obsession, it was still possible that an individual therapist might do genuine good for a patient, much the same way that a good friend might help someone who was going through inner turmoil. And even the money angle began to make sense to him when he remembered that in America, people tended to think that anything with a high price tended to be worth more-so that paying a whole lot of money to have someone listen to you and apply meaningless theories to your troubles would feel more valuable and therefore provide more solace than getting nonsense advice from a friend for free.

But the one thing Step knew he would never do, despite his new tolerance for the possibility of helpful therapy, was take one of his children to one of those witch doctors. "Why should we?" said Step to DeAnne. "If we took him to a Freudian, we'd find out that he wanted to kill me and sleep with you. A Jungian would link up his imaginary friends to the collective unconscious and some kind of dual hero myth. A Skinnerian would try to get him to perk up and smile at the ringing of a bell. And the new drug guys would dope him up and he'd sleep through the rest of his life."

"We're out of our depth," said DeAnne. "And we need help."

"So does that mean we put our faith in the theories of men," said Step, "instead of trusting in what we claim we believe in? Is Stevie a physical machine, genes acting out the script we gave him? Or is he an eternal intelligence, responsible for his own actions? Do we try to help our own son find his own way out of his own problems? Or do we pay for a therapist to teach him strange new lies to believe in?"

DeAnne looked at him coldly, then, and said, "We're not Christian Scientists, you know."

"And psychiatrists aren't doctors, either," said Step.

"Yes they are," said DeAnne.

"Having an M.D. doesn't make you a doctor," said Step. "People on the waiting lists at clinics get better at exactly the same rate as the people who are being treated."

"I read that article, too," said DeAnne. "But I also noticed that the clinics seemed to do no harm. And maybe if we take Stevie to a doctor he'll realize how much we care about him."

"He'll realize that we think he's crazy," said Step.

"He plays with imaginary friends," said DeAnne.

"And psychiatrists cost thousands of dollars," said Step, knowing that his secret weapon in any argument with DeAnne was to say that they could not afford it.

"Ninety dollars," said DeAnne.

He realized how very serious she was about it. "You've already checked."

"On the cost, yes," said DeAnne. "I went to Jenny's pediatrician, Dr. Greenwald, and he gave me the names of three child psychiatrists in Steuben, and I called them all and asked what they were charging and it's ninety dollars an hour. The only question now is whether the insurance from Eight Bits Inc. will cover a psychiatrist."

"It won't."

"You won't even ask about it?"

And then it was Step's turn to confess. "I already did."

She laughed, but she was angry. "You hypocrite."

"You've been hinting around about this ever since you noticed these imaginary friends," said Step. "I knew you were going to want to do it, and I had to know whether it would be covered. And it won't."

She looked at him, wanting to say something really dangerous-he knew the look, knew she was deciding whether it was worth the fight that would ensue if she said what was on her mind.

He saved her the trouble of deciding. "You're about to accuse me of lying about it," said Step.

"I was not!" she said.

"You were deciding whether or not to tell me that you were going to call Eight Bits Inc. and find out for yourself if it's covered."

"That's not calling you a liar," she said. "That's checking to make sure. What if they thought you meant adult psychiatric treatme nt, and that's not covered, but psychiatric treatment for children is."

"Oh, I see. It's not that I'm a liar, it's that I'm so incompetent that I can't carry on an effective conversation with another adult. You have to check up to see if I missed a little thing like that."

"People can make mistakes!" she said.

"Yes, ma'am, they certainly can," said Step, and he started to leave the room.

"Don't do that!" she shouted at him.

"Don't do what?" he asked.

"Don't walk out on me."

The words hung in the air.

"There's a world of difference," said Step, "between walking out on you and walking out of a room. I'm walking out of a room right now." She started to say something, but he didn't give her a chance. "Right now," he said.

He opened the bedroom door and went into the hall and realized that Robbie and Betsy were playing quietly in Robbie's room, not in the family room as he had thought. Step and DeAnne had raised their voices during this argument-did the children hear? "Hi, kids," he said. "What brings you back here?"

"Stevie told us to get out."

"Are you fine here?"

"Yes.

But Robbie looked so solemn that Step knew that he had heard, that he was worried. "What's wrong, Road Bug?"

"Stevie doesn't like me anymore," said Robbie. His face twisted up to wring out his tears.

"Sure he does, Robot Man," said Step. He sat down by Robbie and put his arm around him. Betsy, of course, began to cry too, since crying was getting Robbie so much attention from Daddy. Step put an arm around her, too, but his attention remained on Robbie. "Stevie's just having a hard time right now."

"What's so hard about it?" asked Robbie. "He just sits around and plays computer games or he plays with Jack and Scotty and he never plays with me."

"Jack and Scotty?" asked Step.

"He's always playing pirates with them, or playing train or something, and he won't play with me, and Betsy's no fun."

"No fun," said Betsy.

"I mean she's just a baby"

"Baby in Mommy's tummy," said Betsy.

"Road Bug, it's hard, you think I don't know that?" said Step. "Stevie's having a hard time at school and I think he's still a little mad at me for making him move. And so he needs to be by himself a lot."

"Then how come he's always playing with Scotty and Jack?" asked Robbie.

Step had to think for a minute. What in the world could he say to that? You have to understand, Robbie, that your brother is retreating from reality into a wonderful magical world full of good friends, which has only one drawback- none of the rest of humanity can get to that place.

"Robbie, can't you just be patient with Stevie for a little longer?" said Step. "He doesn't hate you. He loves you, he really does. He just isn't able to show it as much right now. A year from now you'll look back on this time and you'll say-"

"Don't say 'a year from now,"' said Robbie disgustedly.

"Why not?"

"That's what Mommy always says. 'A year from now you'll look back and laugh."'

His imitation of DeAnne was dead on. Step had to laugh. "Can you do my voice?"

Robbie immediately deepened his voice and said, "Life's a bitch, ain't it?"

"Bitch," said Betsy.

Step was appalled. "I've never said that to you."

"No, you say it to Mom when you think we're not listening," said Robbie. He was very proud of himself.

"Well, now I know that you are listening," said Step.

"What's a bitch, Daddy?" asked Robbie.

"It's just a word for a mommy dog," said Step.

"Woof woof," said Betsy.

"Why did you say life's a mommy dog?" asked Robbie.

"That what a mommy dog say!" shouted Be tsy. "Woof woof woof!"

"Believe me, Robbie, when you get older, you won't even have to ask. The answer will just come to you."

Step unfolded himself and stood up. DeAnne was standing in the doorway to the boys' room, jiggling with silent laughter. "If you hold all that laughter inside," said Step, "it might make the baby pop out."

She laughed all the harder-but still silently.

"Could it really make Mommy pop?" asked Robbie.

"No, Road Bug, I was joking," said Step.

"Why is it a joke when 1 don't think it's funny," said Robbie,

"But when I tell a joke and you don't think it's funny, then you say, 'That's not a joke'?"

"Because I'm the official funny-decider of America," said Step. "Back in 1980 when they elected Ronald Reagan to be president, I got elected to be the national funny-decider, and so if I say it's a joke it's a joke, and if I say it isn't it isn't. Next year they'll elect somebody else, though, because I'm not running again."

"Is that true, Mommy?" asked Robbie.

"What do you think?" asked DeAnne, her eyes wide in a mockery of innocence.

"I bet this is a joke, too," said Robbie.

"You are right indeed, my brilliant boy," said Step.

"If Mommy's laughing does that mean you aren't going to yell at each other anymore?" asked Robbie.

At the word yell, Betsy opened her mouth and let out a fullthroated holler.

"Betsy, don't do that!" said DeAnne. "They can hear you on the street. People will think we're child-abusers."

"We weren't yelling at each other," said Step.

"Yes you were," said Robbie.

"We were arguing because we didn't agree about something," said Step. "That happens sometimes. And maybe we got too loud because we both care very much about the thing we were discussing."

"What were you discussing?"

Thank heaven he didn't understand the actual words we said, thought Step. "We were talking about stuff that only grownups talk about."

Robbie chanted derisively: "Grown. Up. Grown, up."

"Yeah, well, someday you'll be a grownup and then you won't think it's so cute. Now play with your sister."

That's where they left the question of taking Stevie to a psychiatrist-nowhere. It was the first clause in article one of the unspoken constitution of their marriage: If they disagreed about something it was a tie vote, and no one had the power to break a tie, but they both had to promise to think about the other person's side. So Step was thinking about DeAnne's point of view, and DeAnne was thinking about Step's, but this time Step knew that he would never, never agree with her, and he knew that she would never see things his way, either.

Except that in the back of his mind, he knew that he would see things her way. That somewhere in the future he would realize that they really were out of their depth in dealing with Stevie's problem, that Stevie wouldn't just give up on these imaginary friends, and Step would end up walking through the door of a psychiatrist's office one day, taking his own son to the witch doctor to get an incantation that would make the evil spirits go away. It made him angry to think about that, though, and so he put it to the back of his mind and hoped desperately that the whole issue would just stay there, would just go away along with Stevie's imaginary friends.

The memo finally came down from Ray Keene that it was time for all the creative staff to evaluate the IBM

PC and come up with a recommendation. This is it, thought Step. This is what will decide whether I can sign the contract with Agamemnon, the big one that will let me quit this job and never see Dicky Northanger or Ray Keene again. As long as Eight Bits Inc. decides not to support the IBM machine.

And there were plenty of reasons not to support it. The biggest reason was that it was a crippled machine from the start. The operating system was a kludged-together imitation of CP/M; color graphics was only an option, and even if you paid some obscene amount extra to get it, all you got was four colors on the screen at a time, and it was no compensatio n that you could switch between a set of cool colors and a set of warm colors.

The only sound came from a repulsive little onboard speaker that made you want to answer the door whenever it buzzed. It was like somebody had examined the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64 and said, "How can we strip these machines down so there is nothing left that would be remotely interesting to any human being?"

And that's what the other programmers were all saying. It would be easy enough for Step just to let their words go unchallenged. Dicky would take his negative report to Ray, the machine would be dropped, and Step would walk away clean.

Only he would not be clean. Because he knew that a failure to support the IBM PC would be the death knell, in the long run, for Eight Bits Inc. If he didn't speak the truth as he saw it during this time when Eight Bits Inc. was paying for his expertise, then he was a cheat and a liar, even if no one ever knew it, and Step couldn't live with that.

So he spoke up. "OK, it's crippled," said Step. "But it has one feature that no other microcomputer made today has."

"What's that?" asked Glass. His voice was full of challenge, since he was the most vociferous opponent of the PC.

Step pointed to the letters IBM on the case.

"What is that!" demanded Glass. "That's nothing!"

"That's everything," said Step. "That's a vast national sales force, that's credibility, that's reputation, that's big corporations being willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars or half a million dollars putting these things on people's desks."

"We don't do business software," said Dicky quietly.

"Business software will be done by somebody," said Step. "Somebody will do a terrific word processor loaded with features because you can put 256K of RAM in this thing, 512K, you can have a word processor that will stand up and dance if you want it to."

"Nobody will ever put 512K on this thing," said Glass. "You can't fill 512K with meaningful code!"

"Don't get mad at me, Glass," said Step. "I'm just telling you what I think. The machine's a piece of shit, but it's an IBM piece of shit, and where we're looking at maybe half a million 64's in use today, we'll see a million, two million, three million of these on people's desks."

"What does it matter what's on people's desks?" said Dicky contemptuously. "We don't do business software. We write programs for the home market."

"You think a businessman doesn't want to play a game now and then? You think a businessman doesn't want to have a real computer at home?"

"Not for this price," said Dicky. "Not when he can get a Commodore 64 with a printer and a monitor for half what he pays for this overpriced box alone."

It occurred to Step that by being honest he had accomplished what he really wanted. With Step firmly committed to voting for developing software for the IBM PC, Dicky would be even more firmly committed to killing any possibility of Eight Bits Inc. turning to the IBM. I couldn't have set it up better if I had planned it, he realized. So it was with a light heart that he said, "You're wrong, Dicky. We're going to see the IBM market take off until it's the only market."

"Except Apple," said Glass. "That piece-of-junk company just won't die no matter how useless its computers are."

"You're forgetting the Lisa," said Dicky. It was a joke, and so everybody laughed. The poor, pathetic Lisa, a vast overpriced machine whose only selling point was that it made pictures of your disk files instead of just giving them names-as if you needed a picture of a file folder to tell you that your file was a file! "Step probably thinks there'll be nothing around but the IBM and the Lisa."

"Make whatever recommendation you want," said Step. "I can't disagree with a single bad thing anybody's said about the IBM PC. Just tell Ray that I cast a dissenting vote, OK?"

"Oh, I'll be sure to tell him," said Dicky. "I'll tell him that you agree with our assessment as programmers, but that in your great wisdom and vast experience as a businessman you think we should support the IBM PC

based solely on business considerations. I'll go see Ray right now, I think."

Dicky left the room, almost swaggering.

Step could have shouted for joy.

"Man, you just been shat on," said one of the programmers.

"But it was only Dickyshit," said Glass, "so it smells like little roses."

"Little pansies," said another programmer.

"Chanel Number Two," said Step. They all dissolved in laughter.

Robbie and Betsy were safely strapped into seatbelts, while Jenny's innumerable herd was bouncing around in the back of the Renault like Ping-Pong balls in a room full of mousetraps. "Don't you believe in seatbelts?" asked DeAnne the first time they rode anywhere together.

"I believe in seatbelts all right," said Jenny, "but carmakers don't believe in big families. There are never enough."

"You could belt in as many as you can," DeAnne suggested.

"And the ones without seatbelts, what's the message they get from that?" asked Jenny. "Mommy loves the other kids and doesn't want them to die in a crash, but you don't need a seatbelt."

DeAnne laughed, but it still made her feel queasy. "So the solution is to protect none of them? Why not double them up?"

Jenny just looked at her. "DeAnne," she said, "I bet I'll have as many kids live to adulthood as you will. I'm leaving Steuben next month, so let's just figure that there are some things about each other's lives that we aren't going to be able to fix."

"I'm sorry," said DeAnne. "I wasn't criticizing. I just didn't understand."

"I don't understand either," said Jenny. "And we've got to get this dinner over to Sister Ho's house."

DeAnne reluctantly pulled the car out of the Cowpers' driveway, even though she and Step had never before violated their rule that their car never moved without every passenger strapped down.

Now it was late in May, and it seemed as though once or twice a week there was something that required her and Jenny to do some kind of Relief Society compassionate service together. "Compassionate service" invariably meant fixing a meal for somebody. Child in the hospital? The Relief Society brings you dinner.

Husband lost his job? Again, dinner. Down with pneumonia? Dinner.

No, thought DeAnne. That isn't fair. The Relief Society does a lot of other things-hospital visits, taking old widows shopping, and that time Sister Bigelow spent three days getting that woman and her two sons with a car that broke down on I-40 installed in a rented mobile home with borrowed furniture. It's just that meals seem to be the main thing that Jenny and I get asked to do.

DeAnne was getting just a little bit tired of it. "Isn't there a compassionate service leader in this ward?" she had asked Jenny on the phone that morning. The kids were in the back yard playing, and DeAnne was sitting down resting her back because the baby was sticking about nine feet out in front of her now and just standing up took as much work as lifting heavy crates all day.

"There is one," said Jenny. "Sister Opyer. She was called because of inspiration. I know that because no rational person would have called her to do it. Amazingly enough she's been sick every time Ruby Bigelow calls on her to do anything, and now Ruby just calls us."

"Why not release her and call someone else to the position?"

"You don't do that around here," said Jenny. "Sister Opyer wants the position-she just doesn't want to do the work. So if Ruby released her, she'd be hurt and she'd go inactive and all the women in the ward would say that Ruby drove her out of the Church."

"But that's nonsense!"

"You just don't understand the South yet, DeAnne," said Jenny. "I give you about a year. Then it'll suddenly dawn on you that all these sweet, nice, kind-talking people are stabbing you in the back, and you'll think, What a bunch of hypocrites! Then a year later, you'll realize that they aren't hypocrites, they're just so polite that they talk in code. When they say, 'Why I'd be glad to, soon as I can,' that means 'Better do it yourself because I never will.' When they say, 'You think up the most interesting ideas,' it means 'You are plumb loco, woman!' You just have to learn the code."

"How long did it take you to learn it?"

"I'm still learning it,'.' said Jenny. "They still surprise me. But the basic rule is, yes means maybe and maybe means no."

"Why don't they just say what they mean?"

"Confrontation!" cried Jenny. "That would mean confrontation! To say no right out in front of God and everybody? Impossible. No true southerner is capable of it. It would be unseemly. It would be rude."

"Well, I always say what I think, and I prefer it when other people do, too."

"Of course," said Jenny. "You're a westerner. And the southerners in the ward all think that us westerners are the most crude, pushy, bossy, obnoxious, contentious, cantankerous fight-pickin' chest-pokin' rapscallions as ever crossed the Mississippi going the wrong way. If you catch my drift."

"Was that cowboy talk?" asked DeAnne.

"Trust me," said Jenny. "You'll never get a southern Relief Society president to release somebody who doesn't want to be released. Oh, she'll hint around about how it must be such a bur den for poor Sister Opyer and I just don't know how you manage, you sweet thing, what with being so poorly all the time and still having to carry on the burdens of your calling. And if Sister Opyer ever said, It does seem so hard sometimes, but I can manage, then Ruby'd know to release her right off. But instead Sister Opyer says-I was there once, and I think I can remember-she said, 'Oh, Sister Bigelow, it's my calling that sustains me, it gives meaning to my life to know that in the midst of my own suffering I can go out and relieve someone else's.' And you know that after that, Ruby's got no hope of releasing Sister Opyer even if she dies."

"So we do her job," said DeAnne.

"Hey, it's the Lord's work and it needs to be done and we can do it."

"You're more of a Christian than I am."

"So do you want to make the salad or the casserole?"

"I'd like to make the biscuits."

"Not a chance," said Jenny. "You don't know how to make southern biscuits yet and I don't have time to teach you."

"They just look like Bisquick drop biscuits to me," said DeAnne.

"Don't ever say Bisquick around the women of the ward. Might as well sew a scarlet B on your dress after that."

"Salad, then," said DeAnne.

So instead of resting, DeAnne made a Jell-O salad and put it in the fridge to set. And then, along about one-thirty when the kids should have been napping, DeAnne strapped Robbie and Betsy into the car and drove over to pick up Jenny and her brood. They had talked about maybe one of them just tending all the kids while the other took the meal over, but then they realized that DeAnne was too pregnant and tired all the time to deal with Jenny's rowdy crew and DeAnne also couldn't deal with the terror she felt whenever her kids were at Jenny's house and besides, Jenny knew the way and DeAnne needed to get out of the house so there was no other way to handle it-they both went and took the kids.

The family they took dinner to lived way out in the county, and on the long drive back home the kids all fell asleep. Quietly Jenny asked how things were going with Stevie. "Did you decide to go with any of the names that Dr. Greenwald gave you?"

"Step's against taking Stevie to anybody like that," said DeAnne. "I mean really against it. He's not rational about it. I think he'd rather that I had an affair."

"Men," said Jenny. "And they say we're irrational."

"Well, there's some reason for it, but he never says," said DeAnne.

"Does he have some relative who's a shrink?" asked Jenny.

"No," said DeAnne. "Why?"

"I mean, I have an uncle who's a real estate agent and so I hate all real estate agents. I just see one and I want to go get my gun."

"Because of your own uncle?"

"The sleazeball of all sleazeballs," said Jenny. "I can't go into detail because of the little pitchers in the back, but believe me, if you knew this guy you'd want to impose the death penalty fo r general offensiveness."

"Well, he's got no shrinks in his family, anyway," said DeAnne.

"So," said Jenny, "when are you going to take Stevie in?"

"I said, Step won't do it."

"You're at home," said Jenny. "Now that he works human hours, he carpools, so you have the car. You also have the checkbook. Take Stevie in and what's Step going to know till you've done it?"

DeAnne was appalled. "Would you really do such a thing to Spike?"

"If Spike ever dared to put his foot down and forbid me to do something that I knew my child needed, hell yes!"

"Well Step didn't put his foot down," said DeAnne. "We just didn't agree, that's all."

"Well then what's the problem?" asked Jenny. "If he didn't forbid it, then you can just go and do it."

DeAnne was nonplussed. It was as though Jenny came from a different tribe with strange marriage customs. "Jenny" she said, "Step and I don't do things about the children until we agree."

"I can see it now," said Jenny. "The child bleeding to death on the lawn, and you on the phone talking it out with Step."

"It's not like that," said DeAnne. Then she closed her mouth and decided it would be better if she said nothing else.

After a minute, Jenny broke the silence. "Um, if you want to kill me, could you wait till we've got the kids out of the car?"

"What?" asked DeAnne.

"You're going about sixty and this is a thirty- five zone."

It was true. DeAnne immediately put on the brake and the kids lurched around in the back, making grumbling noises in their sleep. "Sorry," said DeAnne.

"Look, be mad at me if you want," said Jenny, "but it's Step you're mad at and you know it. Call it what you want, he's stopping you from doing what you know is right for your child. The mother bear in you is not happy DeAnne. Besides, one of those doctors is even in the ward. Well, she's not a member herself, but her son just joined."

DeAnne made a connection in her mind. "Step was just assigned to a home teaching companion like that. A

young man whose mother isn't a member but she drives him to church."

"That's the one," said Jenny. "She's a shrink. Dr. Greenwald told me she was probably the one most likely to have an opening, too."

"Why, because she's no good?"

"Because she's a woman," said Jenny. "Most men have a harder time going to a woman therapist, and a lot of women have an easier time going to a man. Or they think they will, anyway. Dr. Greenwald said. It's like gynecologists. I for one don't understand why any woman would go to a male ob- gyn ever, now that there are women doing the job, but they still dominate the business. Anyway, she's got a connection with the Church and she's sympathetic. She's more likely to understand."

"Understand what?"

Jenny laughed. "I can see you've never been to a shrink. They think religious people are crazy"

"Not true," said DeAnne, thinking at once of Sheila Redmond back in Vigor. "I knew a therapist and she and her husband were serious Christians. Not Mormon, but they certainly didn't think it was crazy to be religious."

"Have you ever taken the Minnesota Multiphasic?"

DeAnne vaguely remembered that she had taken it once, but couldn't recall anything more than that.

"It's got questions all over it like, Do you believe that God sometimes talks to you? I mean, that's our whole religion, isn't it? That God still talks to human beings. And by their rules it means we're crazy!"

For the first time DeAnne began to think that maybe Step was right. If psychiatrists were really like that, then it could be a disaster to take Stevie to see one. As Step said, they didn't really cure people that often. And if the psychiatrist actually did talk Stevie out of his belief in the gospel ...

"What I'm saying," said Jenny, "is that maybe you can talk Step into it if he knows the shrink and trusts her.

So just make sure he does his home teaching and meets Lee Weeks's mom."

Step came home with his trophies: a copy of his employment agreement, excluding Hacker Snack and any work he might do for computers not being supported by Eight Bits Inc., and the memo from Ray Keene stating that Eight Bits Inc. would not be supporting the IBM PC. He thought DeAnne would be overjoyed.

"I can quit now," he said.

"Not really" she said.

"The option in our contract with Agamemnon says that at any point in the first six months I can send them a letter saying I'll be working on PC programs for them, and that's it. We get a check. And when I turn in Hacker Snack for the 64 we get another check. And when I turn in Hacker Snack for the PC, we get another check. Which means that before Christmas, if I work hard enough and learn 8088 machine language quick enough, we'll have had a total income this year of more than fifty thousand dollars."

"That's fine when all that money comes," said DeAnne. "But what about right now? You may have noticed that we have a baby due in July. I don't think we're going to be able to get a new insur ance policy that will cover a preexisting pregnancy."

Step looked at her belly for a moment, as if the baby might come up with an idea.

"You can't quit till the baby is born," she said. "As it is, the first check from Agamemnon will barely catch us up on the house in Vigor." She held up a letter. "They're warning us that we have thirty days to bring the loan current before they'll begin foreclosing on the house."

"But don't you see?" said Step. "If I quit right now, we'll have enough money to pay for the house and the baby."

"Do you think I haven't gone over the figures?" said DeAnne. "Do you think I haven't read the Agamemnon contract? Do you think I haven't calculated all our payments down to the penny? If you quit now, and anything goes wrong with the pregnancy, we'll be in such deep trouble that we'll never get out. We need the insurance.

We've got to be covered."

She was right, but she was also wrong. "DeAnne, Ray's decision not to support the PC is a deep and serious mistake. Some where along the line-and I think it'll be soon-Ray will realize that and there'll be another memo.

We have a brief time right now when I can quit and go straight into PC projects. But if Eight Bits Inc. is supporting the PC when I quit, then I have to wait a year before I can do anything but Hacker Snack for Agamemnon, and we really can't live on just Hacker Snack for one year, even if it sells brilliantly."

DeAnne looked away from him; he could see that she was trying to control her emotions. "I don't know what to do, then," she said.

"I can't even afford to buy a PC until we exercise our option and get the check from Agamemnon," said Step.

"If we lose the house in Indiana," said DeAnne, "that'll be on our record forever. Every loan application there'll be a questionhave you ever been in default on a loan? Have you ever had a mortgage foreclosed?"

"We won't lose the house," said Step. "We'll lower the selling price, what about that? We won't even get our equity out. That's fifteen thousand down the toilet, but-"

"It's more than that," said DeAnne. "It's the money we spent on the new furnace and the air-conditioning and the rewiring and the Anderson windows and I wish we'd never moved! If we had stayed there and you had just gone to San Francisco on your own, you could have signed with Agamemnon and we'd still be in the house and—"

"DeAnne," said Step, "what good will it do for us to start second-guessing ourselves? We had no way of knowing Agamemnon would take me on-we wrote to them, didn't we? And how would I have gone to San Francisco? We were already broke."

"I know," she said. "But I feel us circling and circling around in a whirlpool, getting sucked down, and this job is something to hold on to."

"What we need to hold on to is my ability as a game designer," said Step. "I'm good at it. I've seen it at Eight Bits Inc. I really do see things that other programmers don't see. I have a knack for it. You've got to trust me, DeAnne, not the check from Ray Keene."

"Don't put it that way!" There was fire in her eyes. "Don't you dare put it that way! Trust in you-I've trusted my whole life to you, the lives of my children, my whole future forever So don't tell me that if I ask you not to quit your job until after the baby is born it means I don't trust you."

"We're fighting about money," said Step.

"We're not fighting at all," said DeAnne. "We're worrying together."

"I'll stick with the job for a while. But if it starts looking like Ray's going to change his policy, I'm quitting on the spot. Not even giving notice. I can't afford to give up this Agamemnon thing."

"Fine, that's good."

But it wasn't good, Step knew. Ray Keene wouldn't give any advance signals that he was going to change his mind. He'd just send around another memo, announcing that Eight Bits Inc. was going to support the PC. It wouldn't even mention that there had ever been a different policy. And there Step would be, holding that new memo, feeling his future slip away. I'll be under Dicky's control, then, Step thought. For years and years and years.

Still, at the moment he knew that DeAnne's fears were more important than his. So he would stay on the job, and they would just have to pray that Ray Keene would be really stupid.

To help ease the tension, Step took over fixing dinner. It was simple-toasted tuna and cheese sandwiches-and while he was doing it, DeAnne could go lie down. But she stayed in the kitchen and tore up lettuce for a salad. Step knew that her way of relaxing was to be with him, to talk to him. His way was exactly the opposite. What he needed was to be alone in the kitchen, fixing dinner, concentrating on the task at hand, letting his tension slip away. But DeAnne could never seem to understand that. When she saw that he was tense or upset or worried, she tried to minister to him, fuss over him, chat with him until he wanted to scream, Just leave me alone! He never did, though. Now he stayed in the kitchen with her as she talked about her day, letting her unwind, knowing that he would be able to get off by himself later, that when he sat down at the 64 in his office and started working on the Hacker Snack adaptation again, he could shut everything out and that would be good solo time for him.

As Step was still mixing up the tuna and Miracle Whip, the phone rang. It was a woman. "Is this Mr.

Fletcher?"

"Yes," said Step. "And who is this?"

"I'm Lee Weeks's mother. I understand you want to take him somewhere tonight."

Step was puzzled. He hadn't called Lee Weeks yet. He was too busy. It was nearly the end of the month, and so he needed to call him if he was going to get any of his May home teaching done. He had even said so to DeAnne. But he hadn't actually called Lee Weeks. And he certainly had not planned on going out home teaching tonight.

"Just a second," he said on the phone. "Can you hold on for a second?"

"Of course," said Mrs. Weeks.

Step covered the handset and looked at DeAnne. "It's my home teaching companion's mother. She thinks I'm planning to take him somewhere tonight."

"Yes," said DeAnne. "I called her for you. I thought you wanted me to help you get it scheduled."

"Tonight?" asked Step. "You didn't mention it to me."

"I didn't actually talk to anybody," said DeAnne. "I left a message on her machine, that's all. That you wanted to take him home teaching. I don't think I said tonight, but maybe something I said gave her that impression."

Step uncovered the phone. "Sorry for the delay," he said. "Yes, I wanted to take Lee home teaching. I've been assigned as his companion. What we do is, we go visit in the homes of a few families in the ward. We teach a little lesson, we see if they need anything. Like a permanent Welcome Wagon, without the gift certificates."

She laughed. "Well, that certainly sounds fine. But I'd like to meet you before you take him. You know that he doesn't drive. Sometimes he tries to, and you must understand that he is not to drive. He doesn't have a license. And I need to meet you, I think."

"Yes," said Step. "I'd be glad to meet you, and I won't let him drive." How old did she think her son was?

At nineteen, the poor kid still had his mother screening anybody who came to pick him up and take him anywhere. And she made such a point of his not driving.

Maybe he's an epileptic or something. Maybe he can't drive and it isn't just that she's being overprotective.

Give the woman the benefit of the doubt.

"Lee will be ready at seven-thirty," said Mrs. Weeks. "Do you think you can have him home by nine?"

"Between nine and nine-thirty," said Step. "We wouldn't be able to visit anybody later than that anyway."

"Well, I'll look forward to meeting you, then."

She gave him the directions and they said their good-byes.

Step went back to the tuna fish, feeling glum. "I was all set to really plunge into Hacker Snack tonight," he said. "This wasn't a night that I wanted to go home teaching."

"I'm sorry," said DeAnne. "I've been thinking through what I said, and I'm sure tha t all I said was that my husband, Stephen Fletcher, wanted to set up an appointment to go home teaching with Lee Weeks. She's the one who interpreted that to mean tonight."

"Fine," said Step. "I wasn't blaming you." DeAnne seemed really upset. Or worried, anyway. She still hadn't calmed down since the conversation about quitting. "She sounds nice."

"So you're going home teaching then?"

"Yes," said Step.

She seemed relieved. What, had she worried that he was somehow drifting away from the Church? Why would it relieve her when he went home teaching?

Never mind.

He turned the heat on the griddle. "If the salad's ready then I'll start toasting the sandwiches," he said.

"Yes, sure," said DeAnne. "I'll call the kids." She struggled to her feet and left the room.

Two months left, thought Step, and she's already so big she's got the pregnant-woman waddle. What's it going to be like for her by the end of July?

Lee Weeks lived in a simple ranch-style house out in the county, but there was a lot of yard around it and it was all meticulously landscaped and manicured. And the driveway was a turnaround. La-di-da, thought Step as he drove up and parked at the front door.

Mrs. Weeks answered the door. She was slim, and Step imagined that she probably thought of herself as tall, though of course she was much shorter than he was. She brought him into the living room and engaged him in conversation; he was aware that she was extracting information from him, but it wasn't really the information he expected her to be interested in. She did ask what he did for a living-the standard American status measurement--but then she went on to talk about an odd array of things, includ ing local politics.

Gradually it dawned on him that she was testing him. But for what? She found out that he thought the mixed-race city schools should be consolidated with the mostly-white county schools. That he opposed Jesse Helms and his racist attacks on Governor Hunt, his probable opponent in the next election. What could this possibly have to do with Lee? Yet it was only when Lee's mother was certain that Step was a staunch civil rights supporter that she finally called her little boy into the room.

Little boy! When he walked into the room, Step realized that the kid must be at least six- five, because Step, at six-two, found himself staring straight into Lee's chin. Nineteen years old, tall enough to be an NBA guard, and his mother still wouldn't let him drive or go out with strangers until she interviewed them. Strange indeed.

Especially since he was really a good- looking kid. Surely somewhere along the line he would have found out that he was attractive to women and got himself out from under her thumb.

Lee was cheerful enough, though, and when they finally got out into the car, Lee started laughing. "Mom's really something, isn't she!"

"A very interesting woman."

"She treats everybody like a patient." Lee seemed to be full of barely smothered mirth.

"A patient?"

"Oh, she's a shrink, didn't you know? Couldn't you feel yourself being analyzed?"

"I guess I could," said Step.

"She's nice, though," said Lee.

That was a weird thing to say about your own mother, thought Step. And he said it with such detachment that she could have been anybody. His teacher. His chauffeur.

Which, in fact, she was.

It was already well after eight o'clock, so Step had been right when he guessed that they'd probably only get to make one visit tonight. Step had decided on Sister Highsmith, an elderly widow, since she would presumably be glad to see them and wouldn't throw him any curves as he was introducing Lee to the idea of home teaching.

On the way to her house, he briefly told Lee what home teaching was all about.

"Oh, so we're not, like, giving a lesson," said Lee.

"A message is all. Very brief. And then drawing her out, letting her talk. She's been a widow for twenty years, and she's kind of a talker. Doesn't get much company, so whoever comes over is going to get an earful.

But that's fine-that's part of what we're coming for. To help her feel connected to the Church. To life."

"I thought you said this was your first time visiting these people."

"That's right. I've never met this sister, in fact. Or anyway, not that I remember."

"Then how do you know so much about her?" asked Lee.

"I don't know anything about her."

"She's a widow for twenty years, she's lonely, she's a talker..."

"Oh, well, that's just stuff that the elders quorum president knew about her. I mean, she's had home teachers before us."

"So we report on these people?"

"Man, you make it sound like we're spying," said Step, laughing.

Lee didn't laugh.

"Lee, it's not like that. We don't pry. People tell us what they want to tell us. Most of it's just like stuff you'd tell any friend. And we don't talk about it except if the Church needs to get involved. Like, for instance, this one family back in Vigor, Indiana, the dad was a trucker but he broke his leg playing touch football. They weren't even active in the Church, but I was their home teacher and I went to their house and the mom spilled her guts about how they didn't have any money and no insurance and they didn't know where to turn. She had a job, but as she said, she was getting paid like a woman, so they were not exactly going to make ends meet. They didn't have anything to eat till she got paid on Monday. So I invited them over to dinner at our house. And then I went and got her visiting teachers and we went to the store and did a week's worth of grocery shopping and dropped it off at their house."

"Oh," said Lee.

"We didn't tell anybody else in the ward except the bishop, and he got in touch with them about welfare assistance and it was all very discreet. You see what they need, and then you do it. If that's spying, I wish I had more spies in my life." Which was true enough-presumably someone had been assigned to home teach Step's family, but they had never shown up. Home teaching was a great idea, but it just didn't happen all that often, and when it did it usually wasn't much more than dropping by, taking up a half hour with empty conversation, and then saying, Well, let us know if you need anything, and then they were gone till the last day of the next month. No need to tell Lee that yet, though. Why not let him think that Mormons actually took home teaching seriously and watched out for each other faithfully? There'd be plenty of time to be disillusioned later, and in the meantime Lee might have got into the habit of doing it right.

When they got to Sister Highsmith's apartment building, Step and Lee waited in the car for a moment while Step led them in a short prayer. Help us know what she needs and provide it for her, help her know that she can rely on us-that sort of prayer. Then they went up to the door and knocked.

It took forever for her to get to the door, but when she got there it was as if she were receiving royalty. She was dressed to the nines and her stark white hair looked as though she had just stepped out of a beauty parlor.

She was gracious and elegant, as was her home, though it tended to be a little too knick-knacky for Step's taste.

A grandma house, he decided, a grandma house where the grandchildren never came, so that nothing had ever had to be put up out of the reach of children.

But there were pictures of children, and so Step asked about them, and that was good for fifteen minutes of talk about how wonderful they were but their parents just didn't seem to take the gospel seriously and the children were downright frivolous sometimes, all except her son's eldest girl, who was quite a serious child and wrote to her once a month, without any prompting from the girl's parents, which is a very fine thing in this day and age when children have no respect.

When that subject wound down-that is, when Sister Highsmith started asking about his family-he answered her briefly and then commented on the fact that she didn't seem to have a southern accent. That was good for another fifteen minutes about all the moving around that she and Nick had done before he retired from the military and they settled in Steuben. He died a year to the day after he retired, even though he had just invested most of their savings and all of her inheritance in a little fast- food franchise, but it turned out that Der Wienerschnitzel just didn't do all that well in Steuben. It just wasn't a southern franchise, they realized too late-southerners didn't want mustard and onions on their hot dogs, they wanted chili and Cole slaw and they also wanted a place to sit down and they weren't go ing to pay Der Wienerschnitzel prices to do it. So the business wound down and even though she lost all that money, she didn't mind, because she had plenty of pension money on top of social security and her life with Nick had been a good life and if he had lived he would have made the franchise work, she was sure of it. So now it was just a matter of waiting until the Lord saw fit to take her home to heaven so she could be with Nick again.

"Do you really think he's in heaven?" asked Lee.

It was the first thing he had said in Sister Highsmith's house after the initial greeting, and the question just hung there in the air for a moment, as Sister Highsmith tried to discern whether he was challenging her assessment of her husband's righteousness.

"Brother Weeks here is new in the Church," Step explained. "I don't think he's suggesting that Brother Highsmith isn't in heaven, I think he's asking a doctrinal question."

"Oh, yes," said Lee. "I didn't think of it that other way-no, of course he's in heaven! I mean, even people who open hot dog franchises can still go to heaven, right?" He laughed, and Sister Highsmith and Step politely laughed along, though Step was meanwhile thinking, OK, let's get this boy out of here. Apparently Mommy hasn't given Lee much chance to learn what you do and don't say, and what you do and don't joke about.

"What I was asking," said Lee, "was whether you think your husband is a god."

Step cringed inside. What had the LeSueurs taught this boy? Step loathed the way tha t some Mormons bandied about the idea of godhood as if it were first prize at the county fair and really good Mormons would bring it home like a giant stuffed bear.

"I mean that's what first attracted me to the Mormons," said Lee. "Was the idea that human beings can become gods. I've always felt that. And then I saw this movie about how that's what you Mormons all believe and so I phoned up the church here in town and the missionaries came by."

"What was the movie?" asked Step. "Was it by any chance called The Godmakers?"

"Yes, that was it," said Lee.

"That's an anti-Mormon film," said Step. "It distorts our doctrines beyond all recognition. And the answer to your question is no, Sister Highsmith does not believe that her husband is a god. He's a man, and a good man-am I right, Sister Highsmith?"

"The very best sort of man," she said. "He became a colonel before he retired."

"Yes," said Step, "and now his spirit has left his body behind and he lives on with those of his family who died before him. But Lee, becoming holy and perfect enough to fully share in God's work is very rare and when it does happen it would happen only after long development and a long, long time after death and to most people it never comes at all. It's not like becoming a colonel." And then, to help Lee realize that the discussion should now end, Step added, "And it's not a doctrine that we discuss much." Or at least, if we have any sense of proportion we don't discuss it much. We don't even understand what Joseph Smith meant by it, for heaven's sake! Much better to concentrate on things like loving your neighbor and trying not to screw up your life and the lives of everybody around you than to get into mysterious doctrines.

Apparently mysterious doctrines were all that Lee wanted to talk about. "I think about becoming a god all the time," he said. "I think it would be neat to design planets and stuff. I could sure do a better job than this world."

Sister Highsmith blanched, and Step knew that she would not be reluctant if he now got Lee out of the house. "Well," Step said, "it was wonderful to meet you, Sister Highsmith. Can we have a word of prayer before we go?"

"Oh, do you have to go already?" she said.

Step cringed again, waiting for her to say the obligatory Don't go, wait awhile, it's early yet.

But she didn't say it. "Well, how sweet of you two to come by. And I'd be glad if you'd say the prayer, Brother Fletcher."

Yes, Lee had really put the stamp of strangeness on this evening. Sister Highsmith was glad to see them go-not exactly the best finish for the evening.

Out in the car, Lee seemed oblivious to the idea that he might have said something wrong. "That was neat," he said. "To be able to talk like that about things that I've just kept bottled up inside for years. I mean, that's the best thing about the Mormons, I can tell my secret thoughts and people understand. Not like Mom, I can't tell her anything or she just analyzes me to death."

I can understand that, thought Step, if you talk very much about becoming a god. To a psychologist, no less!

"I can feel it inside me, you know," said Lee. "All the time. Sometimes even a voice. And I know that it's the voice of God, it's the presence of God, just like Sister LeSueur told me. She said she had a vision about me, that I had the seeds of godhood inside me and I was just waiting for the gospel to bring it out of me. Some times I think that if I could just strip away all the weakness of this body that just ties me down to earth I could fly.

And I don't mean just flapping around like a sparrow or something, I mean soar up to the stars, go from planet to planet. I feel like that sometimes. I mean, sometimes I think that I really have done it, that yesterday I was on another planet just like this one, only the old one wasn't as real, this one is the real one, the other one was just an imitation and now, for the first time, I can see what reality is, what it means to be alive, and I think, No one else can see this, I'm the only one who can see this, because the god inside me has opened my eyes. Everybody else sees it, I mean, but they don't really see it. They see but they don't-they can see but-"

He was beginning to sound almost frantic, as if the right word were just out of reach and he couldn't quite find it. So Step offered a finish for this impossible thought. "You're saying that they apprehend it with their eyes, but you comprehend it."

"With my soul," said Lee, "yes, just like that! That's got to be the Spirit of God, making the connection between us so you know what I'm saying even before I say it!"

Brother Freebody might have warned Step a little better about what he meant by Lee Weeks having some weird ideas about doctrine. Or maybe Lee hadn't been this extreme about it when Freebody talked to him. Or maybe Freebody hadn't believed that he was hearing what he was actually hearing when Lee said it.

"And sometimes I know that I'm the only real person in the world. No offense," Lee added quickly.

"No, that's not an uncommon feeling," said Step. "It's called solipsism. The idea that nothing is real except the self."

"No, I don't just mean a feeling, like anybody can get. I mean I know that God sees me and recognizes me as his kindred spirit, like a lost twin. Nobody but me ever feels like that. Only I can't tell that to anybody but the Mormons, because you understand! You've known about it all along."

Patiently Step tried to explain the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ was mostly about how we treat other people, and not at all about becoming the most powerful being in the universe and getting into a first-name relationship with God. That was for the bozos on TV who talked about Jeeee-zuz as if he was their old high-school chum or something. Lee listened to everything that Step was saying, nodding wisely and agreeing to all of it. But Step was sure that Lee was missing the whole point of everything.

When they got to Lee's house, his mother was waiting at the door. She seemed to size them up as they came from the car, and by the time Step got up to the house, she was beaming. Only on the porch did it occur to Step that there was no reason for him to have walked Lee to the door. That was what Step did with thir teen-year-old babysitters, to make sure they got in safely. Home teaching companions over the age of eighteen you could just let out of the car. But for some reason Step had just expected himself to come to the door.

"Please come in," she said warmly. Her whole demeanor was different. This was the woman on the telephone. What had happened since eight o'clock?

"I can't stay," said Step. "Got to get home. I don't see my family half enough as it is."

"Oh," she said, looking disappointed. "Perhaps some other time."

"Well, in fact you'll probably see me a couple of times a month. We home teach four families, and we do it every month."

She raised her eyebrows, but she seemed to be pleased all the same. "How nice," she said. "What a very social church you have."

"I suppose so," said Step, thinking how wearing that sociability could sometimes be.

"And how was Lee?" she asked.

Lee was standing right there. It was so outrageous, to ask about him as if he were a small child in another room, and not an adult, a man, standing right beside her. Yet Lee beamed. He seemed to expect a good report card, and so Step delivered one. "Lee was great," he said. "He spoke right up and we had a good visit."

No need to tell Mommy that Lee got a bit weird about doctrine. To explain that, he'd have to explain the doctrine, and it always sounded deeply weird to nonmembers. Or it should, anyway- it wasn't quite natural, the way Lee had taken right to it, and all the wrong way. You had to build up to understanding it, and it was a sure thing that Lee had neither the buildup nor the understanding.

But there was plenty of time, if he stayed in the Church. A lot of people came into the Church with serious misconceptions about the gospel- no matter how clear the missionaries were, people were going to filter ideas through their own preconceptions and come out with something skewed at least a little bit off plumb, and sometimes a lot more than a little bit. If they stuck with it, though, and realized that correct opinions about doctrine weren't anywhere near as important as learning to serve other people, to accept and fulfill responsibility, then eve ntually they'd loosen up enough to come around and change their beliefs, too, or at least not be upset that most Mormons didn't see things the same way.

Outsiders usually seemed to think of Mormons as automatons, obeying a charismatic prophet the way Jim Jones's followers obeyed him in Guyana. The reality was almost the opposite-stubborn, self- willed people going off every which way, with bishops and other ward leaders barely able to hold them all together, all the while tolerating a wide range of doctrinal diversity as long as people would just accept their callings and then be dependable. There was room even for Lee Weeks, who seemed to be obsessed with a rather inflated view of his own divine potential; given that the 1st Ward already had Dolores LeSueur, Lee's ambitions could certainly be taken in stride.

"I'm so glad," she said. Step was relieved to see Mrs. Weeks smile.

But no, it was Dr. Weeks, wasn't it? "Lee says you're a psychologist," said Step. The idea of her being a psychologist seemed somehow very important. Then he realized why-Stevie. Stevie and DeAnne's idea of what they ought to do for him. Suddenly Step looked at Dr. Weeks in a different light.

"Not a psychologist," she was saying. "A psychiatrist. The M.D. isn't much-just years of medical school and internship and residency." She chuckled.

"I'm sorry," said Step. He almost added, What Lee actually said was, She's a shrink. But he decided that he shouldn't get on her bad side because maybe she was the one who could bring Stevie back from the company of Scotty and Jack.

"Oh, I'm used to people getting the different branches of our profession confused," said Dr. Weeks. "I'm called a psychoanalyst just as often, and of course that's wrong, too. That's more of a priesthood than a profession, anyway."

She spoke with a light, amused tone, but Step took the words as a very good sign. He liked this woman, this shrink.

"Well," Step said. "Till next time, OK?"

"Right!" said Lee.

When Step got home, DeAnne was in the kitchen, waiting for him. Everything was cleaned up, and she was reading a book. It was the Anne Tyler novel he had bought her more than a month ago. "You just getting around to that?" he asked.

"No, I started it back when you first gave it to me," she said. "But then I didn't like her for a little while."

"Oh," said Step. "And now you've kissed and made up?"

She made a face at him. "It was just something that the character said in the beginning. This old woman is in bed, probably dying, and she thinks how her children ought to have had an extra parent instead of just her.

The husband ran off."

"And that made you mad?"

"No, it was that she had decided to have her second and third child for just that reason. So she could have extras. When the first one almost died of croup. I thought it was the most awful idea, to have your later children as spares in case you lost the early ones."

"It's not really so awful," said Step. "People thought that way for thousands of years. What does it say in Proverbs about a man having lots of sons? Blessed is he who has a quiverful, or some thing like that."

"A quiver," said DeAnne. "How phallic."

"Actually, it's the arrow that's phallic. A very confused sexual image."

"Anyway" said DeAnne, "I just couldn't believe Tyler really meant that. So I just reread that opening again and I realized that that was just what the character had thought, not Tyler herself. And in fact the character realized right away that each child had become an irreplaceable person and not just a spare in case one of the earlier ones didn't work out."

"So now you can read it."

"Oh, who has time? But I thought I'd just check it out to make sure I liked it well enough to take it into the hospital with me."

"You've got two months till the end of July," said Step.

"I like to plan ahead. What if I got stuck in there with just People magazine?"

"If you like I can bring you the Enquirer as soon as the baby's delivered."

"I thought you had enough of me throwing up already."

Truth was, she hadn't thrown up that much with this baby. The best morning-sickness period of all four pregnancies. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe this baby was going to be no trouble. Maybe Step wouldn't have to lie beside his bed every night for the first three years of his life, humming "Away in a Manger" over and over again. Maybe this one wouldn't wake up with screaming nightmares: Maybe this one wouldn't periodically decide to hit a sibling over the head with something heavy.

Then it occurred to him that DeAnne was not waiting up at the kitchen table to read a book-she could have done that in bed. She was waiting up to talk to him at the opposite end of the house from the children.

"What's up?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said. "How did it go?"

"Fine. Lee's a little weird, but Sister Highsmith was fine. A nice old lady who likes to talk but then she's never boring, so it's OK. Not a lot of woes and troubles, either. Most of what she talks about is bragging about her late husband or her wonderful children or her even more wonderful grandchildren who are being spoiled or overprotected by her very stupid children."

"I thought her children were wonderful."

"Only when they were children," said Step. "Now they're parents and so they've become stupid. Hey, it happened to our parents, didn't it? And it's happened to us, too."

"Are we really stupid parents, Step?"

"By definition," said Step. "I was a brilliant parent till Robbie was born. Then all the things I'd learned about parenting went right out the window. Robbie was completely different from Stevie and so nothing that worked with Stevie worked with Robbie. I think that's why second-child syndrome develops. You know, nice cooperative first child, rebellious and troublesome second child.

The first child was raised by confident parents. The second child was raised by parents who were nervous wrecks, trying to apply first-child methods to second-child problems. No wonder second kids want to spend most of their teenage years screaming at their parents."

"Poor Robbie. And what explains Elizabeth's temper?"

"I haven't analyzed third-child syndrome yet," said Step. "Give me time. She's still very, very short."

They sat in silence for a few moments.

"Did you meet Lee's mother?" asked DeAnne.

"Sure," said Step. "It's kind of impossible not to. She guards Lee like a tigress. I felt like I was going through a job interview just to get her to call Lee into the room so we could go."

"I can understand being protective."

"Yeah, well, especially with Lee. The kid's got a twisted sense of what it means to be Mormon."

"Oh really?"

"It's not so much that he can hardly wait for God to retire so he can move into the job, like Sister LeSueur.

It's more like he thinks that he already is God, or at least a god, and he thinks Mormonism is cool because we seem to be the only ones who understand that a divine person like him is possible."

"How strange," said DeAnne.

"But he's young. Young people fantasize about a lot of things." Step had been thinking about his own youthful thought that maybe someday he would be president, or a great conquering general like Frederick the Great, or a doctor who discovered the cure for cancer. But now, when the words came out of his mouth, he instantly thought of Stevie. Of what Stevie was fantasizing. Not some grandiose megalomania. Just having a friend, that was all. A couple of friends. Did that make him crazy? It was Lee Weeks who was crazy if anybody's child was, and his mother was a psychia trist, for heaven's sake.

"She's a shrink, too," said Step, following his own thought and not the thread of the conversation.

"Who is?" asked DeAnne.

"Lee's mother," said Step. "She's a shrink. That's what he called it. He said, She's a shrink. But she's nice, though."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"No, I mean, that's what he said. That she was nice though. As if to be nice was sort of a contradiction to being a shrink."

"So now we actually know a psychiatrist," said DeAnne.

"Well, not like we're intimate friends."

"But at least we wouldn't be sending Stevie to a stranger."

It came to him all at once. DeAnne knew perfectly well that Dr. Weeks was a shrink. And it wasn't just that.

DeAnne had set up the home teaching appointment, had pushed him into doing his church calling, which she had never done before, just so that he'd meet a psychiatrist. In fact, Dr. Weeks might well be one of the shrinks on the list she got from Jenny's pediatrician. There couldn't be that many shrinks in town. DeAnne had manipulated him. It made him feel sick and angry, and he wanted to say something really cruel and walk out of the room.

Instead he just sat there, thinking. What had she done, really? Just helped him to do his home teaching. Just helped get him into a position where he'd meet a psychiatrist. What was so bad about that?

She didn't tell me, that's what was so bad. She maneuvered me to this position instead of persuading me to it.

But Step hadn't left her much room to think that he'd be open to changing his mind. And so if she really felt strongly about getting help for Stevie, maybe she thought there was no other way. So it isn't that she manipulated me. No, I feel angry and sick because I'm ashamed that I'm the kind of husband whose wife thinks she has to do this kind of manipulation in order to get from her husband what she thinks her child needs.

I must be a really terrible husband, in her view, that she has to fool me. Like the giant's wife in Jack and the Beanstalk. Doing her best to save the life of the small person in her care by keeping him out of the way of the cruel, awful, tyrannical husband.

When the silence had grown very long, he said, "Maybe you could find out her office number and set up an appointment for Stevie. If she takes children."

"Do you think she'd be good for him?"

No, Step thought. I don't think any more of psychiatrists now than I did before. Less, in fact, because she's so weirdly protective of her own son. Treating him like a child at this age. No wonder he has power fantasies, with her shepherding him through life as if he were incompetent to zip his own fly after peeing. What's she going to do for my child when her own is Lee Weeks?

That wasn't fair. Just because she couldn't see the problems in her own family didn't mean she couldn't see clearly the problems in others. When Step had been elders quorum president, he had seen a lot of things clearly about other people's lives, but his own was just as murky to him as ever.

"She might be," said Step. "As good a chance as anybody else. And like you said, we know her."

"You know her," said DeAnne.

"Well, anyway," said Step. "Make the appointment. And then we have to figure out how to break it to Stevie that we're taking him to a shrink."

"It will help if you don't call her a shrink in front of him."

Oh, you've already thought this all through, I'm sure. "Well don't call her a psychiatrist, either," said Step.

"Call her a therapist."

"Why? A psychiatrist is a doctor, and a therapist isn't. Sheila is a therapist."

"In contemporary American culture," said Step, "going to a psychiatrist means you're crazy. But going to a therapist means you're rich and stylishly uptight."

"I hate it when you talk about 'contemporary American culture' this and 'contemporary American culture'

that."

Well, I hate it when you treat me like a puppet you can maneuver however you want. I didn't know how much I hated it till now, because up till now you had never done it.

"Can I get you anything to eat?" asked DeAnne.

"I've already gained about fifteen pounds working at Eight Bits Inc.," said Step. "The candy machines are killing me. The last thing I need is a snack."

"Just asking," said DeAnne. "Are you upset about something?"

Yes. "No. I'm just tired. I wasn't planning on spending tonight home teaching."

"I'm sorry," said DeAnne. "I told you, I wasn't trying to set it up for tonight, I just figured you wouldn't mind if I tried to establish contact with your companion. Are you coming to bed soon?"

"I suppose," said Step. "Is there anything good on Thursday nights?"

"We have forty channels," said DeAnne.

"Yeah," said Step, "but thirty-three of them are Jimmy Swaggart clones trying to heal hemophiliacs with the hemoglobin of the Holy Spirit. Or was that Ernest Ainglee?"

"It was that weird crewcut guy with the crazy eyes," said DeAnne. "Don't stay up too late. You have work in the morning, you know."

DeAnne left before she could see how Step tensed up at those words. Yes, I have work in the morning. I don't have to have work in the morning, though. I could walk in and give notice tomorrow and tell Keene where to stick his Dicky. I could let them fire me and collect unemployment. But no, you won't let me get out from under Dicky's thumb, because you don't trust me to make enough money to pay for the baby, you don't even trust me enough to talk to me rationally about getting a psychiatrist for Stevie. You have to trick me into it.

Step hated feeling such rage toward the person he loved most. And it wasn't the yearning love of young romance, but rather the kind of love that made her feel like part of his own self, so that he couldn't imagine a future without her beside him. To be so savagely angry at her was terrible.

He went to the sink to get a drink of water. Is this how divorce begins? he wondered. A feeling of terrible rage, of betrayal, a sud den discovery that maybe the marriage isn't as real and honest and strong as you thought it was? Then it builds up and builds up and builds up and then you find yourself living in an apartment somewhere and seeing your kids on weekends.

No, he said to himself. No, I forbid it. I will not let it happen, and neither will she. I'll just have to work on being the kind of husband she doesn't think she has to manipulate. Lord, help me to be whatever it is she needs me to be so we can hold this thing together. Just get us through this summer. Through this year. And then we won't need any more help, we'll be OK.

He set down the glass and turned around. There she was, in the doorway, her eyes red-rimmed.

"I knew she was a psychiatrist," said DeAnne.

"What?"

"I set up that home teaching appointment for you because her name was on Dr. Greenwald's list, and I thought that if you met her maybe you'd like her and even trust her and then you'd take Stevie to her. I didn't actually lie to you but I still didn't tell you the truth."

The tears spilled over her eyes onto her cheeks. She angrily wiped them away with her shirtsleeve.

"I know you hate me now," she said. "We don't trick each other and lie to each other, ever, and now I did it."

Step walked to her, put his arms around her. "I knew that you knew," he said.

She leaned away and looked up at him. "You did?"

"Not earlier, but here in the kitchen, I realized it. That you set me up."

"And you aren't mad?"

"Yeah, I was mad," said Step.

"But you didn't say anything," she said.

"No," said Step. "I got a drink of water instead."

She gave a little laugh that was almost a sob. "That doesn't make any sense at all," she said.

"I know," said Step. "But that's what I did. And I'm not angry now, because you told me."

Now she cried in earnest. Clinging to him. Tears of relief, of release. "Step, you can quit your job. You really can. It's wrong of me to make you stay. You hate it there, and we'll make it anyway, I know we will. So what if we lose the house in Indiana. It's just a house. It's just money. I can't stand the thought of you going every day to a job you hate just because I'm so scared of things being so out of whack in our lives."

"That's OK," said Step.

"I mean it," she said. "You can quit. And we don't have to take Stevie to a psychiatrist, either. I really don't have to have everything my way, you know."

"I know," he said. And he knew that, for the moment at least, she really meant it. But he couldn't take this capitulation of hers seriously. Her need for him to stay at work till the baby came was real and deep. And as for taking Stevie to a psychiatrist, it was the only solution she had thought of for her sense of helpless frustration with Stevie. He couldn't deny her that unless he could come up with something better, and he couldn't.

"I mean it," she said.

"I know you mean it," said Step. "But I won't quit. For now, anyway. But it means a lot to me that if I just can't take it anymore, you'll understand."

"I will, Step, I really will. It's up to you. I'll just expect that one of these days you'll come home and say, It was time, and that'll be fine with me. I want you to come home! I want you here with me and the kids. Our life was so good in those days."

"It was, wasn't it," said Step.

"And it still is," she said. "My life is still good because you're in it. Everything good in my life comes from you."

Step shook his head. He knew she meant it, but in fact he knew that it wasn't true. Even the good she found in him was really the goodness she had put into him, the goodness he had put on himself like a disguise in order to get her to marry him. He had known that she could only be happy with a husband who was good in certain distinct ways. Like going to church with absolute faithfulness, and fulfilling his callings, the whole nine yards.

And so for her he started going to church again, and she never realized that it was a sacrifice he was making out of love for her, in order to be part of her. She thought it was his own desire, and she loved him for it. But what she was really loving was herself, reflected back to her. And even now, when she clung to him, it was not Step the historian or Step the programmer she was clinging to. It was Step the faithful Mormon, and she had given him that role herself. It was Step the father of her children, and those, too, had been her gift.

"Make the appointment with Dr. Weeks tomorrow," said Step. "We'll start him as soon as school lets out a week from tomorrow. So he never has to leave class to go see his psychiatrist."

She clung all the tighter to him. "You're really something, Junk Man," she said.

Yeah, thought Step. When you get your way.

And then he pushed the nastiness out of his mind and just held her. This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard.