"I'm sure he'll gain some weight," Homer said, but his entire body shivered suddenly; Wally's body had been so strong. Homer remembered the first time Wally had taken him to the ocean; the surf had been unusually rough, and Wally had warned him about the undertow. Wally had taken him by the hand and shown him how to duck under the waves, and how to ride them. They had walked along the beach for an hour, undistracted by Candy; she had been tanning.
"I don't understand all this stupid lying down in the sun," Wally had told Homer, who agreed. "You're either doing something in the sun and you pick up a little color, or you're doing something else--but you're doing something. That's the main thing."
They were picking up shells and stones--the beachcombers' search for specimens. Homer was immediately impressed with the smoothness of the stones and the broken pieces of shell--how the water and the sand had softened them.
"This is a very experienced piece," Wally had said, handing Homer an especially worn bit of shell; it had no edges.
"Experienced," Homer had said.
And after that, Wally had said, "And this is a worldly stone," exhibiting an old, smooth one.
Homer thought that his desire for Candy had changed everything, even the natural process of the grinding smooth of stones and shells. If he and Wally went back to the beach, would they still be beachcombers, or was it inevitable that the love of a woman would alter even their most commonplace
experiences together? Was he my friend for five minutes? wondered Homer Wells--and my rival for the rest of my life?
Homer entrusted Nurse Edna with the care of the hillside orchard. He explained that the wire-mesh sleeves around the trees could not be wrapped so tightly that they didn't permit the trees to grow--but also not so loosely that the mice could girdle the trees. He showed her how to spot the tunnels of the pine mice who ate the roots.
Everyone kissed Candy good-bye, even Wilbur Larch--who, when he reached to shake Homer's hand, appeared embarrassed that Homer brushed past his hand and hugged him, and kissed him on his leathery neck. Nurse Edna sobbed the most freely. As soon as the pickup truck rolled past the girls' division, Wilbur Larch closed himself in the dispensary.
It was a Sunday, so Raymond Kendall was at work on his homemade torpedo when Homer brought Candy home. Candy told Homer that she could not face seeing Olive until the next morning, but she was gripped by an unforeseen panic when Homer drove off with Angel. Although her milk was gone, she knew she would still wake up to her baby's clock--even though it would be Homer, alone, who was hearing the actual cries. And how many nights had it been since she had slept alone?
She would tell Homer the next day: "We've got to find a way to share him. I mean, even before we tell Olive--not to mention, Wally--we have to both take care of him, we have to both be with him. I just miss him too much."
"I miss you," Homer Wells told her.
He was an orphan who'd had a family for less than a month of his life, and he was not prepared to not have a family again.
When he and Angel arrived at Ocean View, Olive greeted Homer as if she were his mother; she threw her arms around him, and kissed him, and wept. "Show me that baby--oh, he's darling!" she cried. "Whatever possessed you? You're so young, and you're all alone."
"Well, the baby was all alone, too," Homer mumbled. "And Candy will help me with him."
"Of course," Olive said. "I'll help you, too." She carried Angel to Wally's room, where Homer was surprised to see a crib--and more baby things, for just one baby, than could have been collected in a thorough search of both the boys' and girls' divisions in St. Cloud's.
An army of bottles, for the formula, awaited Homer in the kitchen. Olive had even bought a special pot for sterilizing the nipples. In the linen closet, there were more diapers than there were pillowcases and sheets and towels. For the first time in his life, Homer felt that he'd been adopted. To his horror, he saw that Olive loved him.
"I think that you and Angel should have Wally's room," Olive said; she had obviously been busy, planning. "Wally won't be able to climb stairs, so I'm having the dining room made into a bedroom--we can always eat in the kitchen, and the dining room has that terrace for when the weather's nice. I'm having a ramp built from the terrace to the patio around the pool, for the wheelchair."
As Homer held her while she cried, a new guilt surrounded him, like the nightfall, that ever-old, ever-new remorse that Mr. Rochester had told Jane Eyre to dread, that "poison of life."
In the second week of May, Ira Titcomb and Homer worked alongside each other, putting the bees out in the orchards. It was the start of blossom time, the night before Mother's Day, when they put out the hives. Everyone remembered Mother's Day that year; no one forgot Olive. The house was full of little presents and lots of apple blossoms, and some of the work crew even gave Homer a Mother's Day present--they thought it was so funny that he'd adopted a baby.
"Just imagine you with your very own baby!" was the way Big Dot Taft put it.
In the apple mart, where they were giving the display tables a fresh coat of paint, there were two babies on display--Angel Wells and Florence and Meany Hyde's boy, Pete. Pete Hyde looked like a potato compared to Angel Wells--which is to say that his disposition was entirely bland and he had no apparent bones in his face.
"Well, Homer, your Angel is an Angel," Florence Hyde would say, "and my Pete's a Pete."
The apple-mart women teased him endlessly; Homer just smiled. Debra Pettigrew was especially interested in handling Angel Wells; she would look intently into the baby's face for the longest time before announcing that she was sure the baby was going to look just like Homer. "Only more aristocratic," she guessed. Squeeze Louise said the baby was "too precious for words." When Homer was out in the field, either Olive or one of the apple-mart women looked after Angel, but most of the time Candy looked after her baby.
"We kind of adopted him together," she would explain. She said it so often that Olive said Candy was as much of a mother to that child as Homer was, and Olive therefore--as a kind of joke--gave Candy a Mother's Day present, too. All the while, the bees did their work, carrying pollen from the Frying Pan to Cock Hill, and the honey leaked between the clapboards that housed the hives.
One morning, on a corner of the newspaper, Homer Wells saw Olive's handwriting--a penciled remark above the day's headlines, any one of which might have prompted Olive to respond. But somehow Homer thought the remark was written to him.
INTOLERABLE DISHONESTY
Olive had written.
And one night Candy overheard Ray. Her bedroom light was out; in the pitch dark she heard her father say, "It's not wrong, but it's not right." At first she thought he was on the telephone. After she drifted back to sleep, the sound of her door opening and closing woke her up again, and she realized Ray had been sitting in her room with her--addressing her in her sleep, in the darkness.