Free Regina's Song by David Eddings Page B

shelves installed as soon as I finish painting. I want to polish it all off before the local U-Haul place closes. I’ll rent a truck this afternoon and bag on up to Everett first thing tomorrow morning.”
    “I’ll go along,” he rumbled. “Loading furniture into a truck is a two-man job.”
    “I was sort of hoping you might make that offer,” I said, grinning at him.
    “Have you got everything up there all packed?”
    “It’s ready to roll.” Then I went back to painting.
    I finished up by midafternoon, and then I went to the U-Haul place and rented a truck.

    James and I got an early start the next morning. It was Saturday, and of course it was raining. It
always
rains on weekends, or had you noticed? Monday through Friday can be sunny and bright, but come Saturday, you get rain. James and I talked a bit on the way north, and James told me that he’d started at the university after his wife had died of cancer. “I needed something to distract me,” he said rather shortly. He clearly didn’t want to go into any greater detail.
    There was an awkward silence for a while as we drove past Lynnwood through the steady drizzle.
    “What got you into English, Mark?” he asked finally.
    “Dumb luck, probably.” I launched into a description of my years at the community college and my early major in “everything.”
    “You sound like a throwback to the Renaissance—Mark da Vinci, maybe, or possibly Mark Borgia.”
    “It was an interesting time, that’s for sure. Isn’t that an old Chinese curse? ‘May you live in interesting times’?”
    “I seem to have heard that.”
    “I was just dabbling, James,” I explained. “I wasn’t even working toward a degree—I took courses in anything that sounded interesting. What got
you
into philosophy?”
    He shrugged. “The usual stuff—’The meaning of life,’ or the lack thereof.” He seemed to hesitate a moment. “It’s none of my business, but how is it that a young fellow who works for a living came to own a house? That usually doesn’t come along until quite a bit later.”
    “It’s an inheritance,” I told him. “My folks were killed in a car accident, and there was some mortgage insurance involved in the estate.”
    “Ah,” he said and let the matter drop.
    We reached my house in north Everett, and I backed the truck up to the front porch. Then we hauled out my furniture and box after box of my books. Books aren’t
quite
as heavy as salt, but they come close. James and I were both sweating heavily by the time we finished up. “Now I see why you needed so much shelf space,” he observed.
    “Tools of the trade,” I said. “I guess I’m one of the last precomputer scholars, so my books take up lots of room—which is fine with me. When I read something, it’s on a real page, not a monitor. No hysteria about rolling blackouts.”
    I had to shift my emotions into neutral as I made a quick survey of the now-empty house—I didn’t want to start blubbering.
    “Tough, isn’t it?” James said sympathetically.
    “More than a little. I grew up here, so there are all sorts of memories lurking in the corners. There’s a big cherry tree in the backyard, and the Twinkie Twins used to spend hours up in that tree eating cherries and squirting the pits at me.”
    “Squirting?”
    “You put a fresh cherry pit between your thumb and forefinger and squeeze. If you do it right, the pit zips right out. The twins thought that was lots of fun. It was a summer version of throwing snowballs.”
    “You have twin sisters?”
    “Not exactly. They were the daughters of my dad’s best buddy.”
    “Were?”
    I hesitated for a moment. The story was almost certain to come out eventually anyway, so there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it. “One of them was murdered a few years ago. The other one went a little crazy after that and spent some time in a private sanitarium. Now she’s starting to come out of it—sort of. She’s staying with her aunt down