Free Star Time by Joseph Amiel Page B

goal.
    Next morning the gift-wrapped box was gone from the porch. He assumed his father had disposed of it.
    Every Christmas after that, until he went off to college, his mother sent Greg a card with a little note on it. He would read it and then make a point of not saving it or the envelope that bore her address. He never answered her, and she never returned.
    After a long while, Chris spoke again. "Isn't it time you forgave her?"
    "Some things can never be forgiven," Greg quietly replied.
    Chris wished she could understand what he was feeling behind the impassive expression. It never changed and his eyes never wavered all the time the woman stood at the grave until she finally drove away. Only then did Greg start up the car and drive down to it.
    He left the car and, picking his way the few feet up the narrow path and then across two other graves, finally stood before the granite marker that read: "Margaret H. Lyall ." The H was for Henrietta, their father's mother's name. Meggy had always hated it and made him swear he would never tell a soul what it was. It made no difference now, but he was sorry that his mother had placed the initial on the only permanent reminder that Meggy had ever lived, of who she was. Perhaps she had had it placed there as small solace to his father if he should ever make the trip. Greg’s gaze dropped to the rectangle of myrtle at his feet. Somewhere beneath it Meggy lay, awaiting his good-bye all these long years. That thought broke the dam of tears behind his eyes, and he sobbed for all the years stolen from her and for how much during all those years he had missed her.
    Much later, he noticed an old rabbi trudging along the sidewalk at the edge of cemetery section. Greg asked him to recite the Hebrew prayer for the dead for his sister, who had always believed in God. He wondered to himself if Meggy suspected at the end that God had forsaken her. He also paid the old man to say prayers for Grandfather Kaplowitz and for his father, even though his father had been a Presbyterian. The only reason he could give was that he did not wish to slight him in this episode of remembrance.
    Chris drove back; Greg was too aggrieved. He seemed to have collapsed into himself. They had planned to stop for dinner at a picturesque inn tucked along a byway of the route, but Greg said he'd rather not, and they continued on into Los Angeles.
    He fell asleep that night hugging Chris. All night, in his sleep, he pulled her more tightly to him each time she shifted even a few inches farther away.
     
    The incident breached the fortress Greg had erected around his feelings and allowed Chris, as no one else had been allowed since his childhood, to enter inside him. He no longer felt the need to present a perfect and impregnable facade to her. He could talk about his feelings and more significantly, about his fears. She lightened his heart.
    Once he confided, "I'm so consumed by what I want to achieve and to have, so driven, that sometimes I get afraid there's nothing else."
    "There's love," she assured him. "And much more. I know."
     
    Changing viewing habits is a long process. As time slipped by and KFBS news's rise was halted for a while or measurable only in tiny fractions of a point, the urgency intensified for a quicker improvement in the ratings. Stew grew more quick-tempered and capricious and put greater pressure on Greg. The ratings were still creeping up, but at an agonizingly sluggish pace as competing news programs struggled just as hard to fine-tune their broadcasts to attract viewers.
    The previous executive producer had once been heard to remark, "If I didn't put it on the air, it never happened." But the job invoked neither cynicism nor self-importance in Greg. Rather, what exhilarated him was commanding the people and resources to transform his notions into pictures and words, to tame chaos like an unruly beast and make it dance to his vision in all those little boxes. He loved being in the pilot's seat