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And some of the nights in blossom time, Candy would say to Homer, "You're an overworked father."
"Isn't he?" Olive would say admiringly.
"I'm going to take this kid off your hands for the night," Candy would say, and Homer would smile through the tension of these exchanges. He would wake up alone in Wally's room in anticipation of Angel needing his bottle. He could imagine Raymond Kendall getting up to heat the formula and Candy being in her bed with the bottle of formula in as near an approximation of the correct angle of her breast as she could arrange it.
Ray's torpedo parts were stolen from Kittery Navy Yard; both Homer and Candy knew that's how he got them, but only Candy criticized Ray for it.
"I've caught more mistakes in the way they do things than they know things to do," Ray said. "Not likely they could catch me."
"But what's it for, anyway?" Candy asked her father. "I don't like there being a bomb here--especially when there's a baby in the house."
"Well, when I got the torpedo," Ray explained, "I didn't know about the baby."
"Well, you know now," Candy said. "Why don't you fire it at something--at something far away."
"When it's ready, I'll fire it," Ray said.
"What are you going to fire it at?" Homer asked Raymond Kendall.
"I don't know," Ray said. "Maybe the Haven Club--the next time they tell me I spoil their view."
"I don't like not knowing what you're doing something for," Candy told her father when they were alone.
"It's like this," Ray said slowly. "I'll tell you what it's like--a torpedo. It's like Wally, comin' home. You know he's comin', you can't calculate the damage."
Candy asked Homer for an interpretation of Ray's meaning.
"He's not telling you anything," Homer said. "He's fishing--he wants you to tell him."
"Suppose it all just goes on, the way it is?" Candy asked Homer, after they had made love in the cider house--which had not yet been cleaned for use in the harvest.
"The way it is," said Homer Wells.
"Yes," she said. "Just suppose that we wait, and we wait. How long could we wait?" she asked. "I mean, after a while, suppose it gets easier to wait than to tell?"
"We'll have to tell, sometime," said Homer Wells.
"When?" Candy asked.
"When Wally comes home," Homer said.
"When he comes home paralyzed and weighing less than I weigh," Candy said. "Is that when we spring it on him?" she asked.
Are there things you can't ease into? wondered Homer Wells. The scalpel, he remembered, has a certain heft; one does not need to press on it--it seems to cut on its own--but one does need to take charge of it in a certain way. When one takes it up, one has to move it. A scalpel does not require the authority of force, but it demands of the user the authority of motion.
"We have to know where we're going," said Homer Wells.
"But what if we don't know?" Candy asked. "What if we know only how we want to stay? What if we wait and wait?"
"Do you mean that you won't ever know if you love him or me?" Homer asked her.
"It may be all confused by how much he's going to need me," Candy said. Homer put his hand on her--where her pubic hair had grown back, almost exactly as it was.
"You don't think I'll need you, too?" he asked her. She rolled to her other hip, turning her back to him--but at the same time taking his hand from where he'd touched her and clamping his hand to her breast.
"We'll have to wait and see," she said.
"Past a certain point, I won't wait," said Homer Wells.
