The Mask

he spent two hours proofreading and polishing his novel. And it was an unusual night when Carol didn’t have some paperwork to catch up on.
    As they dressed in robes and bedroom slippers, Paul said, “We’ve got to learn to take most evenings off. We’ll have to spend plenty of time with the kid. We’ll owe it to him.”
    “Or her.”
    “Or them,” he said.
    Her eyes shone. “You think they’ll let us adopt more than one?”
    “Of course they will—once we’ve proven we can handle the first. After all,” he said self-mockingly, “am I not the hero who saved good old Al O’Brian’s life?”
    On their way to the kitchen, halfway down the stairs, she stopped and turned and hugged him. “We’re really going to have a family.”
    “So it seems.”
    “Oh, Paul, I don’t remember when I’ve ever been so happy. Tell me this feeling’s going to last forever.”
    He held her, and it was very fine to have her in his arms. When you got right down to it, affection was even better than sex; being needed and loved was better than making love.
    “Tell me nothing can go wrong,” she said.
    “Nothing can go wrong, and that feeling you have will last forever, and I’m glad you’re so happy. There. How’s that?”
    She kissed his chin and the corners of his mouth, and he kissed her nose.
    “Now,” he said, “can we please get some fettuccine before I start chewing my tongue?”
    “Such a romantic.”
    “Even romantics get hungry.”
    As they reached the bottom of the steps, they were startled by a sudden, loud hammering sound. It was steady but arrhythmic: Thunk, thunk, thunk-thunkthunk, thunk-thunk…
    Carol said, “What the devil’s that?”
    “It’s coming from outside… and above us.”
    They stood on the last step, looking up and back toward the second floor.
    Thunk, thunk-thunk, thunk, thunk…
    “Damn,” Paul said. “I’ll bet one of the shutters came loose in the wind.” They listened for a moment, and then he sighed. “I’ll have to go out and fix it,”
    “Now? In the rain?”
    “If I don’t do anything, the wind might tear it clean off the house. Worse yet, it might just hang there and clatter all night. We won’t get any sleep, and neither will half the neighborhood.”
    She frowned. “But the lightning… Paul, after everything that’s happened, I don’t think you should risk climbing around on a ladder in the middle of a storm.”
    He didn’t like the idea, either. The thought of being high on a ladder in the middle of a thunderstorm made his scalp prickle.
    She said, “I don’t want you to go out there if—”
    The hammering stopped.
    They waited.
    Wind. The patter of rain. The branches of a tree scraping lightly against an outside wall.
    At last, Paul said, “Too late. If it was a shutter, it’s been torn off.”
    “I didn’t hear it fall.”
    “It wouldn’t make much noise if it dropped in the grass or the shrubbery.”
    “So you don’t have to go out in the rain,” she said, crossing the foyer toward the short hall that led to the kitchen.
    He followed her. “Yeah, but now it’s a bigger repair job.”
    As they entered the kitchen, their footsteps echoing hollowly off the quarry-tile floor, she said, “You don’t have to worry about it until tomorrow or the day after. Right now, all you’ve got to worry about is the sauce for the fettuccine. Don’t let it curdle.”
    Taking a copper saucepan from a rack of gleaming utensils that hung over the center utility island, he pretended to be insulted by her remark. “Have I ever curdled the sauce for the fettuccine?”
    “Seems to me the last time you made it, the stuff was—”
    “Never!”
    “Yes,” she said teasingly. “Yes, it definitely wasn’t up to par the last time.” She took a plastic bag of mushrooms from the big, stainless-steel refrigerator. “Although it breaks my heart to tell you this, the last time you made fettuccine Alfredo, the sauce was as lumpy as the mattress in a ten-dollar-a-night motel.”
    “What a vile accusation! Besides, what makes you such an expert on ten-dollar-a-night motels? Are you leading a secret life I ought to know about?”
    Together, they prepared dinner, chatting about this and that, bantering a lot, flying to amuse each other and to elicit a laugh now and then. For Paul, the world dwindled until they were the only two people in it. The universe was no larger than the warm, familiar kitchen.
    Then lightning flickered, and the cozy mood was broken. It was soft lightning, nothing as dazzling and destructive as the bolts that had struck outside of O’Brian’s office a