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"It's one thing having them pick," Wally said carefully. "I mean, everyone accepts them, but they're only migrants--they're transients. They're supposed to move on. I don't think that a colored woman with an illegitimate child is going to be made to feel all that welcome in Maine. Not if she's staying."
Candy was cross. She said, "Wally, in all the years I've been here, I've never heard anyone call them niggers, or say anything bad about them. This isn't the South," she added proudly.
"Come on," Wally said. "It only isn't the South because they don't live here. Let one of them actually try to live here and see what they call her."
"I don't believe that," Candy said.
"Then you're dumb," Wally said. "Isn't she, old boy?" Wally asked Homer.
But Homer Wells was watching Angel. "Are you in love with Rose Rose, Angel?" Homer asked his son.
"Yes," Angel said. "And I think she likes me--at least a little." He cleared his own dishes and went upstairs to his room.
"He's in love with the girl," Homer said to Candy and Wally.
"As plain as the nose on your face, old boy," Wally said. "Where have you been?" He wheeled himself out on the terrace and took a few turns around the swimming pool.
"What do you think of that?" Homer asked Candy. "Angel's in love!"
"I hope it makes him more sympathetic to us," Candy told him. "That's what I think about it."
But Homer Wells was thinking about Mr. Rose. How far would he go? What were his rules?
When Wally wheeled himself back into the house, he told Homer that there was some mail for him in the apple-mart office. "I keep meaning to bring it up to the house," Wally told him, "but I keep forgetting it."
"Just keep forgetting it," Homer advise
d him. "It's the harvest. Since I don't have time to answer any mail, I might as well not read it."
Nurse Caroline's letter had also arrived; it was waiting for him with Dr. Larch's letter, and with a letter from Melony.
Melony had returned the questionnaire to Homer. She hadn't filled it out; she'd just been curious, and she'd wanted to look it over more closely. After she'd read it a few times, she could tell--by the nature of the questions--that the board of trustees were, in her opinion, a collection of the usual assholes. "The guys in suits," she called them. "Don't you hate men in suits?" she'd asked Lorna.
"Come on," Lorna had told her. "You just hate men, all men."
"Men in suits, especially," Melony had said.
Across the questionnaire, which would never be filled out, Melony had written a brief message to Homer Wells.
DEAR SUNSHINE,
I THOUGHT YOU WAS GOING TO BE A HERO. MY MISTAKE. SORRY FOR HARD TIME.
LOVE, MELONY
Homer Wells would read that, much later that same night, when he couldn't sleep, as usual, and he decided to get up and read his mail. He would read Dr. Larch's letter, and Nurse Caroline's, too, and any doubts that were remaining about the doctor's bag with the initials F.S. engraved in gold had disappeared with the darkness just before dawn.
Homer saw no reason to add irony to their predicament; he decided not to send Melony's response to the questionnaire to Larch or to Nurse Caroline--how would it help them to know that they had turned themselves in when they might have gone on for another few years? He sent a single, short note, addressed to them both. The note was simple and mathematical.
1. I AM NOT A DOCTOR.
2. I BELIEVE THE FETUS HAS A SOUL.
3. I'M SORRY.
"Sorry?" said Wilbur Larch, when Nurse Caroline read him the note. "He says he's sorry?"
"Of course, he isn't a doctor," Nurse Angela admitted. "There'd always be something he'd think he didn't know; he'd always be thinking he was going to make an amateur mistake."
