Lightning

a treasure you are—"
    "Charles Manson when he's paroled."
    "No. Someday you're going to be every bit as happy as I am. I know it. Destiny, Thelma."
    "Good heavens, Shane, you've become a raging optimist! What about the lightning? All those deep conversations we had on the floor of our room at Caswell—you remember? We decided that life is just an absurdist comedy, and every once in a while it's suddenly interrupted with thunderbolts of tragedy to give the story balance, to make the slapstick seem funnier by comparison."
    "Maybe it's struck for the last time in my life," Laura said.
    Thelma stared hard at her. "Wow. I know you, Shane, and I know you realize what emotional risk you're putting yourself at by even just
wanting
to be this happy. I hope you're right, kid, and I bet you are. I bet there'll be no more lightning for you."
    "Thank you, Thelma."
    "And I think your Danny is a sweetheart, a jewel. But I'll tell you something that ought to mean a lot more than my opinion: Ruthie would have loved him too; Ruthie would have thought he was perfect."
    They held each other tightly, and for a moment they were young girls again, defiant yet vulnerable, filled with both the cockeyed confidence and the terror of blind fate that had shaped their shared adolescence.

    Sunday, July 24, when they returned from a week-long honeymoon in Santa Barbara, they went grocery shopping, then cooked dinner together—tossed salad, sourdough bread, microwave meatballs, and spaghetti—at the apartment in Tustin. She'd given up her own place and moved in with him a few days before the wedding. According to the plan that they had worked out, they would stay at the apartment for two years, maybe three. (They had talked about their future so often and in such detail that they now capitalized those two words in their minds—The Plan—as if they were referring to some cosmic owner's manual that had come with their marriage and that could be relied upon for an accurate picture of their destiny as husband and wife.) So after two years, maybe three, they would be able to afford the down payment on the right house without dipping into the tidy stock portfolio that Danny was building, and only then would they move.
    They dined at the small table in the alcove off the kitchen, where they had a view of the king palms in the courtyard in the golden late-afternoon sun, and they discussed the key part of The Plan, which was for Danny to support them while Laura stayed home and wrote her first novel. "When you're wildly rich and famous," he said, twirling spaghetti on his fork, "then I'll leave the brokerage and spend my time managing our money."
    "What if I'm never rich and famous?"
    "You will be."
    "What if I can't even get published?"
    "Then I'll divorce you."
    She threw a crust of bread at him. "Beast."
    "Shrew."
    "You want another meatball?"
    "Not if you're going to throw it."
    "My rage has passed. I make good meatballs, don't I?"
    "Excellent," he agreed.
    "That's worth celebrating, don't you think—that you have a wife who makes good meatballs?"
    "Definitely worth celebrating."
    "So let's make love."
    Danny said, "In the middle of dinner?"
    "No, in bed." She pushed back her chair and got up. "Come on. Dinner can always be reheated."
    During that first year they made love frequently, and in their intimacies Laura found more than sexual release, something far more than she had expected. Being with Danny, holding him within her, she felt so close to him that at times it almost seemed as if they were one person—one body and one mind, one spirit, one dream. She loved him wholeheartedly, yes, but that feeling of oneness was more than love, or at least different from love. By their first Christmas together, she understood that what she felt was a sense of belonging not experienced in a long time, a sense of family; for this was her husband and she was his wife, and one day from their union would come children—after two or three years, according to The Plan—and within the shelter of the family was a peace not to be found elsewhere.
    She would have thought that working and living in continuous happiness, harmony, and security day after day would lead to mental lethargy, that her writing would suffer from too much happiness, that she needed a balanced life with down days and miseries to keep the sharp edge on her work. But the idea that an artist needed to suffer to do her best work was a conceit of the young and inexperienced. The happier she