Watchers

powered mechanical arms, controlled by three push buttons, turned the pages and held them in place. A quadriplegic could operate it with a stylus held in his teeth; Einstein used his nose. The dog seemed immensely pleased by the arrangement. Now, he whimpered softly about something he had just read, pushed one of the buttons, and turned another page.
    Travis spelled “wicked” and picked up a lot of points by using a doublescore square, so Nora used her tiles to spell “hurkey,” which was worth even more points.
    “‘Hurkey’?” Travis said doubtfully.
    “It’s a favorite Yugoslavian meal,” she said.
    “It is?”
    “Yes. The recipe includes both ham and turkey, which is why they call it—” She couldn’t finish. She broke into laughter.
    He gaped at her in astonishment. “You are putting me on. You are putting me on! Nora Devon, what’s become of you? When I first met you, I said to myself, ‘Now, there’s the grimmest-damn-most-serious young woman I’ve ever seen.’”
    “And squirrelly.”
    “Well, not squirrelly.”
    “Yes, squirrelly,” she insisted. “You thought I was squirrelly.”
    “All right, yeah, I thought you were so squirrelly you probably had the attic of that house packed full of walnuts.”
    Grinning, she said, “If Violet and I had lived in the south, we’d have been straight out of Faulkner, wouldn’t we?”
    “Too weird even for Faulkner. But now just look at you! Making up dumb words and dumber jokes, conning me into believing them ‘cause I’d never expect Nora Devon, of all people, to do any such thing. You’ve sure changed in these few months.”
    “Thanks to you,” she said.
    “Maybe thanks to Einstein more than me.”
    “No. You most of all,” she said, and abruptly she was stricken by that old shyness that had once all but paralyzed her. She looked away from him, down at her tray of Scrabble tiles, and in a low voice she said, “You most of all. I’d never have met Einstein if I hadn’t met you. And you .. . cared about me . . . worried about me . . . saw something in me that I couldn’t see. You remade me.”
    “No,” he said. “You give me too much credit. You didn’t have to be remade. This Nora was always there, inside the old one. Like a flower all cramped up and hidden inside a drab little seed. You just had to be encouraged to. . . well, to grow and bloom.”
    She could not look at him. She felt as if a tremendous stone had been placed on the back of her neck, forcing her to bow her head, and she was blushing. But she found the courage to say, “It’s so damn hard to bloom. . . to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it’s hard. Desire to change isn’t enough. Or desperation. Couldn’t be done without . . . love.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper, and she was unable to lift it. “Love is like the water and the sun that make the seed grow.”
    He said, “Nora, look at me.”
    That stone on her neck must have weighed a hundred pounds, a thousand.
    “Nora?”
    It weighed a ton.
    “Nora, I love you too.”
    Somehow with great effort, she lifted her head. She looked at him. His brown eyes, so dark as to be almost black, were warm and kind and beautiful.
    She loved those eyes. She loved the high bridge and narrow line of his nose. She loved every aspect of his lean and ascetic face.
    “I should have told you first,” he said, “because it’s easier for me to say it than it is for you. I should have said it days ago, weeks ago: Nora, by God, I love you. But I didn’t say it because I was afraid. Every time I let myself love someone, I lose them, but this time I think maybe it’ll be different. Maybe you’ll change things for me the way I helped change them for you, and maybe this time luck’s with me.”
    Her heart raced. She could barely get her breath, but she said, “I love you.”
    “Will you marry me?”
    She was stunned. She did not know what she’d expected to happen, but certainly not this. Just hearing him say he loved her, just being able to express the same sentiments to him—that was enough to keep her happy for weeks, months. She expected to have time to walk around their love, as if it were a great and mysterious edifice that, like some newly discovered pyramid, must be studied and pondered from every angle before she dared to undertake an exploration of the interior.
    “Will you marry me?” be repeated.
    This was too fast, recklessly fast, and just sitting