Rick and Jane got up late the next morning, but they’d gone late the night before, and enjoyably so at that. Rick had done his best to honor her request, and he’d done pretty darn good as far as she was concerned. She may have been a little sore and aching in the morning, but she was not sorry in the slightest. What’s more, she was especially not sorry that she didn’t expect to have to go to Hartford again, maybe for a long time to come. That made the morning seem even brighter to her.

Rick seemed to be a little tired and achy to her as they got themselves organized in the morning. “You know,” he smiled as she pulled on her underwear after a brief stint in the shower. “You said back in Las Vegas that it would get better, and it really has. Every time I look at you, it seems like a miracle that you came into my life.”

“I’m glad to know you think so,” she smiled at him. “If sex were all there was to being married, I’d think we have nothing to complain about. And I’ll tell you what, Rick: after yesterday, I’m not quite as worried about some of the other issues. I don’t think I can find much to complain about anyway.”

“You mean that what you have now is so much better than what you would have had in Hartford?”

“Yeah, exactly. Believe me, I’d rather have good sex and be bored with other things than be in Hartford smelling that pig shit, especially if I was stuck with some asshole like Howie Newton, like my grandmother seems to want so badly.” She yawned and looked at her suitcase, trying to make up her mind what to wear; once again, a sundress seemed like a good idea. “I think we have it pretty good by comparison.”

“I know I have it pretty good,” he smiled, looking at his wife in her underwear; she could feel him looking and tell that he liked what he saw. “It used to be that I was nothing much but bored. Now, I’m only bored part of the time and have more good sex than I ever could have dreamed about. That strikes me as a huge improvement. I’m never bored when I’m with you, even if we aren’t doing much of anything.”

“Rick, are you hinting that you’d like me to take you back to bed? I’m a little sore, but I’m willing if you are. All I’m trying to find out is if I should get more dressed or less.”

“I would love to take you back to bed, but believe it or not, I’m a little sore, too,” he laughed. “If we don’t get dressed, we could be here all day and it would be all right with me. But maybe we ought to take a pass for once. But don’t rule anything out for tonight.”

“I’m just checking. Either way is fine with me, but maybe we’d better think about getting some breakfast, then getting on the road.”

They got dressed, a little to the surprise of both of them. A little while later, they stopped at a likely looking restaurant up the street for breakfast. “Rick,” she asked as they waited to be served, “we need to do a little planning. Just looking at the map, I’d guess we could make it to Wychbold today if we didn’t mess around, but we’d get in pretty late. Do we really want to wear ourselves out, or should we take it easy?”

“I think I’d like to take my time,” he said after a moment’s thought. “We wouldn’t get to my folks’ house until late. They’ll be working tomorrow, so we couldn’t see them until evening anyway.”

“I don’t know if I should ask this, or if I should ask it this way, but are we going to have a repeat of yesterday? I mean, blow in, spend an hour and then have to leave, probably pretty pissed off from what little was said in our presence?”

“I don’t think so,” he shrugged. “My folks ought to be all right. They’ll be surprised to discover I’ve married you, and I’m looking forward to that surprise and hearing what they say.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I really didn’t want a re-run of yesterday, going in knowing there was most likely going to be trouble.”

“My folks were never really a part of the problem. Oh, they weren’t part of any solution, either. I’ve been back now and then since I left high school, even though I never went out of the house if I could help it. But I haven’t been back since I had to go to San Jose. I’ve wanted to, but you know how I felt about flying, and I don’t like to drive, either. I’ve just never, well, never felt the need that strongly.”

“So you think we’re going to get a reasonable reception?”

“From my folks, yes. They’ll be happy to see me. We don’t talk on the phone or anything very much, but we do it some.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Jane,” he sighed. “You know what I was like when Sophia and Rob introduced us, right? The prototypical geek and nerd, right? And shy as hell to boot?”

“I hate to admit it, but pretty much yes.”

“It was worse, if anything, when I was in school there. I mean, I was the kid everyone beat up on and put down. I had no friends. There weren’t even any people who would be civil to me. The one time . . .”

He was silent for long enough that she had to ask, “Rick?”

“I don’t think . . .” he said slowly, paused for a moment, and went on, “I never wanted it that way. I just wanted to have people be nice to me a little bit. I finally realized it was never going to happen.” He let out a long sigh. “Jane, do you realize that you’re the first girl around my age who has ever even been nice to me?”

“Rick, I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it. Now, since I’ve come to know you, I’ve started to understand that it’s been my own fault, at least a lot, or at least since I left Wychbold. But after what happened with Danielle, I, well, why would I want to?”

“Danielle? I’ve never heard you mention the name.”

“I don’t like to think about her,” he said quietly. “She . . . shit.”

Jane was getting the feeling that there was something important and deep-seated here, something she really ought to know. But she also knew she’d have to let him tell it his way. “Rick?” she said quietly.

“Oh, hell,” he sighed. “I don’t have any idea why she ever thought she had to despise me so. I never did anything to her, other than try to be nice to her once. Once was enough, I never made that mistake again.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t remember exactly when it was. It was before high school, I know that, maybe around sixth or seventh grade, maybe even before then. I’d decided to go down to the Tastee-Freeze to get a cone. She was there with a bunch of her friends. She wanted to get a cone, but didn’t have any money, and I guess her friends must have been broke, too. So I offered to buy her a cone. I mean, I already knew she didn’t like me, but I could at least be nice. So I gave her the money, she bought the cone, then she rammed it into my face with the words, ‘Why should I allow a little twerp like you to buy me anything?’”

“And then?” Jane asked after a moment.

“And then I didn’t say anything, I just went home, washed my face, and spent the next three days crying, because that was when I realized that things were absolutely hopeless and they would never get any better. I wasn’t trying to hurt her, I wasn’t trying to hurt her feelings, I was just trying to be nice to her. But, by god, she never let me forget what an asshole I was for trying. I mean, she never said anything about it again, but from then on all through high school, she didn’t have a good word for me and would go out of her way to try and hurt me. Worse, she got her friends, and later her friend’s boyfriends to do the same thing.”

“Oh, shit,” Jane shook her head. “All because you bought her an ice cream cone?”

“Yeah,” he said, talking a little more easily, now that he’d gotten the story out. “All because this hateful little nerd tried to be nice to her. So putting me in my place became the school sport.”

Jane shook her head. “God, kids can be cruel. Is that all there was to it?”

“I’m sure she thought there must have been more. Hell, my very existence seemed to offend her, so she could make up hateful things out of thin air. I tried to avoid her, but you went to a small school like I did. Sometimes you can’t avoid people you’d like to stay away from. So I had no choice but to put up with that shit from everyone. It didn’t help that Danielle was a beautiful, popular girl who could wrap the guys in the school around her little finger.”

“Did your folks know about this? Did they help?”

“They knew about it,” he sighed. “I don’t know if they thought it wasn’t serious, that they thought it was a kids-will-be-kids thing, or if they didn’t think they could do much about it anyway. It wasn’t all bad. I stayed at home when I wasn’t being tortured in school. We had a computer, not a bad one, and I just about lived on it. I just devoured everything I could about programming languages, about coding. By the time I got to college all the undergraduate stuff was duck soup. At least I could talk to computers.”

“So that’s part of why the situation you’re in at Comsector is so hard on you?”

“It was until Sophia got the idea of finding you. Well, someone like you. Jane, the last month, you’ve rescued me from a lot of shit, just by being you. You may think I rescued you from Hartford, but you rescued me from a lot of that shit Danielle hung around my ears. It’s been more than a fair trade.”

Just then the waitress showed up carrying their breakfasts, and Jane was grateful for the chance to think for a moment. A lot of things about Rick hadn’t made sense before. Now they did.

As soon as the waitress left, she said, “Rick, if it’s going to hurt too much, we don’t have to go to Wychbold.”

“No, I think we’d better go,” he said as he salted down his eggs. “It really has been too long since I’ve seen my folks. I really want to show you off to prove that I can actually have friends, and that I can actually have a beautiful, loving wife. There are people in Wychbold who think that I could never have friends, a girlfriend, or a wife, or who think I should never have been allowed to have them. I want to prove them wrong. I don’t hate my folks, Jane. I don’t even hate Wychbold. I do hate a few people who live there.”

“If they’re still there,” she smiled. “I suppose Wychbold is a lot like Hartford, in that kids want to get the hell out of town as soon as they can.”

“I’m sure some of them must have done it,” he nodded, a lot less emotional than he had been a few minutes before. “In some respects, it’s not a bad little town, not half-abandoned like Hartford. But there are still bound to be some of those assholes around, and maybe they’ll spread the word.”

“Your choice,” she said. “But that still leaves us with the question I asked you first. Should we hurry up and make it there today, or take our time and stop someplace?”

“No, I don’t think we want to arrive all tired. We may or may not wind up staying there a couple of days. Let’s take our time. Maybe we can think of something we want to do along the way.”

Soon they were out in the Beemer again, heading east on the Interstate, again with an easy-listening CD playing on the car’s elaborate sound system. There wasn’t much talking, but Jane had a lot of thinking to do. She understood a great deal more about Rick than she had before, and even understood to a degree how he felt. There had been a kid much like him in high school, back when she had been living in Hartford. There had been no real reason to put him down, but a lot of people did. Jane had mostly stayed away from him, not because she disliked him, but because other students would have made life hard on her if she’d shown any hint of being friendly with him. And at that, Rick had been lucky – Larry had committed suicide in the tenth grade. What an absolute waste! That probably wasn’t something she ought to mention to Rick, though.

They were across the Missouri River and into Iowa before Rick spoke up: “Jane, I’ve been thinking.”

“Oh, dangerous,” she teased lightly.

“Maybe,” he smiled. “You were right the other day that we don’t have a lot in common. I mean, besides liking sex. I think we ought to work on that some, but my only other real interest is software, and I don’t think you’re in any position to learn much about that.”

“You’re right on that. I’d never come close to catching up with you, and I don’t have the math skills, anyway.”

“After what I told you this morning, I’m beginning to wonder if I haven’t put too much of my life into it, especially after I managed to make it out of Wychbold, but I think by then I must have been too scared to take the risk. There are other things in life, and you’ve taught me that. I think I need to take a look at some of those other things. Maybe we should try to develop some new common interests.”

“You mean besides sex?”

“I don’t want to give that up. You’ve sure developed that one in me. I mean, what I was thinking is that maybe I ought to show a little more interest in things you’re interested in. What I was leading up to is wondering if there’s a good art museum in Chicago.”

“Sure, there’s the Art Institute of Chicago, that’s one of the best anywhere in the world. Some people call it the best. It would be no trick to spend days there.”

“I’ve heard you say you don’t have a lot of interest in it anymore, but maybe you could show me a bit about it.”

“It’s an idea,” she conceded. “I have no idea why I took it in my head to study art history. I have no talent for actually doing art but I got interested in the development of it. In a practical sense it was a really dumb thing to do, but I enjoyed it. The art still fascinates me, but as a topic of study I wouldn’t want to even think about it again.”

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t mind spending a day there?”

“To be honest, the hard part would be holding it down to a day, even as disinterested as I am in the subject these days.”

“Fine, let’s do it. I don’t know how much I’ll get out of it, if anything, but it might be a step in the right direction.”

“There’s a lot more to it than ‘paintings are pretty,’ because a lot of them aren’t. But it’s a good place to start.”

“Good. If this doesn’t work, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t, maybe that’ll let us think of something else. Is there any particular type of paintings you especially like?”

“Well, some more than others, obviously,” she replied. “Back when I was in school I was probably most fascinated with the sixteenth and seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish masters. Vermeer, the Brughels, especially Rubens, artists like them.”

“Why do you find them interesting?”

“Because they were realists, at least mostly. See, before them, most art was religious-based. I mean, sweet pictures of the Virgin Mary and the little baby Jesus, commissioned mostly by the church, and it was actually church propaganda in a time when there was a lot of illiteracy. But the renaissance painters started to get away from all that. They were more interested in landscapes, the way people lived, the things of everyday life. This was long before cameras were invented, so scenes that those painters did were almost snapshots of the way people lived. They were filtered through the mind and hand of the artist, of course, but even the filtering was interesting.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m sure the painters weren’t super-realistic,” she explained. “I mean, say you take a picture of a monument with your camera. You get what the monument looks like, but you get things you don’t want, like maybe trash and litter blowing around in front of it, or a flat gray sky when you’d rather have a nice cloudscape. If you’re painting you can edit things like that in or out. So we’re pretty sure that the paintings the old masters did were pretty realistic, but there’s no way of telling how realistic. Still, they give us a window into the past that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

“You can edit a photo, at least a digital one. It’s no great trick, and it can be hard to detect if done by someone who really knows what they’re doing.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not the same thing . . .”

They were well past Des Moines before the conversation wound down. Jane found that she could be a lot more passionate about the paintings than she remembered, or that she thought she cared for any more, or maybe it was because she was almost in instruction mode about them to someone who had little idea of what she was talking about. Rick at least seemed interested, if a bit lost at times, but several times he commented that he’d probably understand more when he was actually looking at the paintings.

They stopped for an extended lunch not long after that; Jane took the opportunity to call ahead to make reservations at a downtown hotel. Over lunch, she made the suggestion that Rick should drive the BMW, at least a little. She’d heard him tell her many times how he didn’t like to drive and how he was a bad driver, but she wasn’t sure how much truth there was to that – she’d never ridden in a car with him driving before. She knew he’d driven out to California, and then from there back to Colorado sometime later. Rick proved to be a careful driver, cautious and nervous about it. After less than an hour she let him off the hook; it had been a good break, and at least she knew he could drive if he had to. On the whole, though, she was more comfortable if she was the one at the wheel.

She drove the rest of the way into Chicago, and she was glad she did – the traffic, especially downtown, was horrendous, even on a Sunday afternoon, and she was sure Rick would have been overwhelmed by it – she could see he wasn’t even comfortable riding in the car in traffic like that. Even with the help of a map they weren’t exactly sure where they were going, but they found the hotel all right.

The next day they went to the Art Institute – in fact, the next two days, and still they never got to everything she would have liked to see. Jane got to look at many pictures she’d only seen in prints or in books, and somehow they seemed even more impressive in real life. She spent a lot of time telling Rick about them, making comments, and a little to her surprise he seemed interested in what she was saying. She didn’t think that hanging around art museums was going to be a major part of their lives, but future visits here and elsewhere didn’t seem to be out of the question. It wasn’t much of a mutual interest, since she was about as far ahead of him in art as he was ahead of her in computer software, but at least it was something to build on.

After a couple of days they were both to the point of about as much renaissance painting as they could stand, at least for one trip, and Jane, at least, was getting a little more curious about what would happen in Wychbold. At times Rick seemed ready to make the visit; at other times, less so. She was beginning to think it would be best to get it over with, one way or the other.

The drive out of Chicago on the Skyway made Sunday’s trip into the city seem placid by comparison. The traffic was even heavier, and it never really let up, even when they got out on the Indiana Turnpike. While Jane was no stranger to urban driving she’d never done a lot of it, at least outside of Boulder, so she was glad to reach the exit from the turnpike, pay their toll, and start north toward Rick’s home town on a relatively quiet two-lane road.

One of the things that impressed her was how lush the countryside was, even in comparison to Nebraska. The Colorado countryside this time of year was mostly brown, but here things were green and growing. There were occasionally small ponds and lakes near the road, with houses and barns in the breaks between the trees. While there were many farm fields, wooded country was not far away.

Rick felt it too. “California is even more brown,” he told his wife. “It gets very dry, and sometimes it seems like the whole state is set to go up in smoke. I guess I’d forgotten what this was like.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Not really,” he sighed. “I guess I’ve gotten used to it out west. This seems almost like a jungle.”

“Are you nervous about this?”

“Yes, I guess I am. Home has seemed, well, not like home. It’s been that way for a long time. I’m not nervous about my parents, but well, the town doesn’t have very good memories for me. If it weren’t for my parents, I wouldn’t bother to come here at all.”

“Is there anything special I should or shouldn’t do or say?”

“I can’t think of anything, other than being your normal friendly, cheerful self. I’m probably not going to be real outgoing since it’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I should be better than I was with your parents. Like I’ve said before, people are going to be surprised that I could have gotten married at all, especially to a warm, friendly, beautiful woman like you.”

“You want me to act like I mean it, I take it.”

“Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I mean, I know you mean it, even though I’m having a hard time believing it really happened to me. I’m hoping you being there with me will put a very unpleasant part of my past to bed.”

Unlike with Hartford, they didn’t get a lot of warning that they were coming into town – it was at least partly hidden in the trees along the road. From behind the wheel of the Beemer, Jane could see that it was a considerably nicer town than Hartford. Oh, here and there she could see the occasional run-down house, not surprising in older neighborhoods like the town seemed to run to. For the most part the lawns were mowed, the houses were well kept, and there wasn’t trash and junk stashed outside, which was more common than not in her home town. While it didn’t seem hugely prosperous, it seemed comfortable. But when she thought of the story Rick had told of what had happened as he was growing up, it seemed a little bit like there were snakes beneath the surface.

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