But the restriction wasn’t really about protecting children that would probably never be conceived. The restriction was to avoid making any commitment, spoken or implied. Eggie and Spunky were “keeping company,” as Miz Eliza put it when Spunky interviewed her.

  “What about Jozette and Elyon?” asked Spunky.

  “What about them?” asked Miz Eliza.

  “Are they keeping company?” asked Spunky.

  “Are you his sister or something?” asked Miz Eliza. “Because Jozette thinks of you as her main rival in trying to win the boy’s heart.”

  “As far as I’ve ever been concerned, Elyon’s heart, now that we know it exists, is for any taker. I never would have guessed it, but Elyon seems to really care for your daughter.”

  “As his non-sister,” said Miz Eliza, “what chance does Jozette have to be happy with him?”

  “It depends on how adaptable she is,” said Spunky.

  “Meaning?”

  “His brain is going to take him into a top-flight math or econ department in a major university. Academic life is full of constant status wars, and the spouses play right along with the actual professors. Jozette’s smart but she’s not educated at the level that other faculty wives will be. Can she adapt? Can she hold her own?”

  Miz Eliza smiled. “Nobody ever beats Jozette at anything,” said Miz eliza. “Because until she wins, the game can’t end.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. But you have to remember—Jozette is the first bosom that has ever danced before Elyon’s eyes. I can’t promise he’ll be faithful in the long run.

  “That’s Jozette’s problem,” Miz Eliza said thoughtfully. “For all I know, she might be planning to marry up farther down the road. Marriage isn’t about controlling the future, it’s about making a plain statement about present intentions.”

  Spunky took this observation to heart. Present intentions are all we ever have. Nothing is under our control, in the end.

  Which is why The Professor’s call on the seventeenth of December didn’t come as a shock. As soon as he told her that she and Elyon should pack up and come home immediately, she laughed. “Of course,” she said.

  “What do you mean, of course?” asked The Professor.

  “Because we’re making such progress and doing so well. Of course the plug’s getting pulled.”

  “You’re awfully young to have such a bitter outlook.”

  “My outlook is fine. It conforms to reality. Why are we shutting down? We’re doing a good job here.”

  “Yes, you are. But the study depends on having at least three different locations that reach the threshold level of participation, and you’re the only one I sent out that’s reaching that threshold.”

  “You never told me what our threshold was.”

  “Two reasons, for that, Spunk. First, I didn’t know that there was a threshold until my first benchmark with the foundation. Second, I wouldn’t have told you anyway, because I find that when people know there’s a threshold, they work hard until they get to that threshold and stop.”

  “I don’t work that way.”

  “You’re human, Spunk, so in fact you do, even when you think you don’t. Come on back.”

  “What is it that you’re not telling me?” asked Spunky.

  “Come on back and I’ll tell you in person that I’m not holding anything back.”

  “Will it be any truer then than it is now?” asked Spunky.

  “Are you trying to burn all your bridges right now, Spunk?”

  Spunky got downstairs only to find Elyon already boxing up the equipment. “The Professor called you first?” she asked.

  “I called him,” said Elyon, “because eighty percent is a rational threshold for an excellent study.”

  “The goal was a hundred percent.”

  “And we’re at ninety,” said Elyon.

  “Why did you rattle his cage?”

  “I wanted to make sure we’d still be here at Christmas.”

  “How did that work out?” asked Spunky.

  “He pulled the plug.”

  “Does this make any sense to you?” asked Spunky.

  “None at all.”

  “Do you like this turn of events?”

  “She’ll stop loving me if I go away now,” said Elyon. Spunky had never heard such misery in his voice.

  “If she’s smart, she’ll keep loving you till you do something asinine like breaking up with her.”

  “Spunky, she’s not smart,” said Elyon.

  “She’s not math smart,” said Spunky. “But she’s way more human smart than you are. For instance, I bet she knows that the issue here isn’t whether she’ll still love you.”

  “Then what is the issue?”

  “If you’re still going to love her, then there is no issue.”

  “You mean she thinks I’ll stop loving her?”

  “That’s right, Elyon. And do you know why she thinks that?”

  “No. I keep my word. I’ve never broken my word to her.”

  “Because you’re a man, Elyon. She knows you’ll keep thinking of her as long as she lets you look down her blouse.”

  “I do not—”

  Spunky didn’t let him finish his outraged protest. “Elyon, if it isn’t just temporary physical attraction due to daily proximity, if you really are committed to her, then she’ll certainly wait until you send for her to come and marry you.”

  “Send for her where?” asked Elyon. “I don’t have any income except this study, and if the study’s over, I’m broke.”

  “Then you come back and the two of you live with her mother.”

  “I’m a scientist! I can’t do any science without a grant.”

  “I know what you mean. Charles Darwin is still waiting for his grant, too.”

  “But his family was rich.”

  Spunky looked at him with barely controlled exasperation.

  Elyon looked back at her for a long time. Until he realized. “Well, my family isn’t rich rich.”

  “Slightly rich will do in this case. Do you think your family could tide you over during your first few months of marriage?”

  “I wasn’t going to tell them.”

  “Because you think they wouldn’t like her?”

  “I know that they’ll hate her.”

  “I’m going to tell you why you’re wrong,” said Spunky.

  “You don’t know them. They’re complete snobs, they hate everybody below the net worth of Bill Gates.”

  “Listen to me, Elyon. I don’t have to know your parents. Because I know human parents, and your parents are of that species, aren’t they?”

  “On their good days,” said Elyon sadly.

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “My parents never sibbled me,” said Elyon.

  “So who is their only hope on God’s green Earth to produce a grandchild for them, replicating their genes into the next generation?”

  Elyon thought a moment. “Well, me, of course, but—”

  “Do you think that at this moment, your parents actually believe that you will ever find a woman to make sweet love to you and raise your babies?”

  Judging from Elyon’s face, that hit him like a slap. But after a moment of stunned silence, he said, “Probably not.”

  “So when you announce to them that you’d like them to support you and your new bride until you can attach yourself to another grant, what will they say?”

  “They’ll ask, ‘Where did she go to college?’” said Elyon.

  “And what will you say back to them?” asked Spunky.

  “Nowhere. She still has a couple of assignments to complete before they’ll finally give her a high school diploma.”

  “Elyon, stop. Think. Do you understand that you’re an idiot when it comes to human relations, and that the better you know people, the worse you get along with them?”

  He thought for a moment. “Except Jozette. And Miz Eliza.”

  “OK, keep that knowledge right there.” Spunky tapped his forehead. “Now listen to me. When your parents ask their snobby questions, like, Who are her parents? What does her father do? How much land do they own? Where did Jozette go to college? You will give the same answer to all those questions.”

  “There’s no one thing that will answer all of them.”

  “You’re wrong, Elyon, because you’re an idiot. You will always be wrong, which is why you have to listen to me, right now. Your answer to all those questions will be, word for word, this: ‘Dad. Mom.’ Or Muzzy and Wuzzy, whatever you call them. ‘Dad and Mom, Jozette has my baby in her and I want our child to have every chance at good health and a good education.’”

  “She isn’t pregnant,” said Elyon. “We haven’t ever done that.”

  “Elyon, I didn’t tell you to tell your parents the truth. I told you how to answer them in order to get the results you want. But if lying bothers you, then make it true. There’s at least one justice of the peace in Good Shepherd, North Carolina, and I know for a fact that there are fourteen separate ministers legally capable of marrying you to Jozette and her to you.”

  Elyon sat down. “They’d kill me.”

  “They won’t kill you. They’ll take three days to get over their shock and rage and disappointment, and then your father will start to say something about how to get the baby aborted or the marriage annulled, and your mother will put on her monster face and speak in her monster voice and here’s what she’ll say: ‘That baby is my grandchild, and if you do anything to harm him or make it so he comes into this world as a bastard or an orphan you will spend the rest of your life looking for your balls, mister.”

  “My mother would never say that.”

  “I can promise you that she’ll say that or she’ll say worse. Because the minute you’re married to Jozette and she passes a pregnancy test, that baby is the most important creature on this planet, as far as your parents are concerned. Especially your mother, because she is never going to have another shot at reproduction, and that’s the biological imperative.”

  Elyon began to nod slowly, and then a very slight smile crept onto his lips. “You really are an expert at reading human nature, Spunky. I’ve seen you do it, time after time. And everybody who comes in here, they won’t stop talking about how wonderful you are and how smart you are, and if I try to correct them they just get mad and stop talking to me.”

  “I’m glad to know that at least you tried to correct them about my being wonderful and/or smart.”

  “Truth matters to me, Spunk,” he said. “If I didn’t care about truth, I wouldn’t be a scientist.”

  “What would you be? A NASCAR driver?”

  “I don’t have quick physical reflexes, Spunk. If I drove a race car, I would die.”

  “So here’s my suggestion, Elyon. Instead of packing up this equipment, which is not needed anywhere until long after Christmas, you stay here, keep entering any samples that come in, and crunch even more numbers to see whatever it is that The Professor saw that made him pull the plug.”

  “He didn’t see anything wrong with our data, it was the other populations that came up short.”

  “He’s lying, Elyon.”

  “He can’t—he doesn’t—he’s a scientist.”

  “He’s a money-spewing grant faucet, Elyon. He stopped being a scientist before he was out of graduate school.”

  “But he does science!”

  “No, Elyon. He writes grants, he wins grants, and then he assigns the best graduate students and post-docs to do the science and write the papers, and he puts his name first on those papers so people like you think he’s a scientist. So whatever reason he has for pulling the plug on us here in Good Shepherd, it has everything to do with his own reputation first, and keeping the grant-granters happy second, and covering up anything that will make him look bad third. Which means his reputation is first and third, and doing good science is down there just after keeping his wife happy enough not to divorce him and right before seeing his children so they can yell at him for being a lousy father.”

  “I thought you liked him.”

  “I do,” said Spunky. “But he just pulled the plug on our study, and I don’t want to leave Good Shepherd. Not now. Not just before Christmas.”

  “Are you pregnant with Eggie’s baby?”

  Spunky closed her eyes. “First, Elyon, I’m not. Second, Elyon, he doesn’t lust after me the way you lust after Jozette, so I’m not really sure that he even wants to have a baby with me—”

  “Oh, come on,” said Elyon. “I’ve seen him kiss you. It’s like he’s ready to explode. So gentlemanly, but his hands are, like, quivering.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “He’s from around here, he’s used to it. It’s you. Why don’t you come to the courthouse and get married the same time I marry Jozette?”

  “Because first, Jozette will only marry you in a church. She’s going to wear white and walk down the aisle and everybody’s going to know she’s marrying a brilliant scientist who loves her, and you know how they’ll know that you love her? Because you’re marrying her and she isn’t even pregnant yet.”

  “A church.”

  “Do you believe in God?” Spunky asked.

  “I’m a scientist. I don’t even think about unfalsifiable hypotheses.”

  “Then you can’t be worried that God will be irritated with you for stepping inside a church or for having the opinion that he probably doesn’t exist.”

  “But what if Jozette wants me to be a Christian?”

  “Anything against having your children baptized? Anything against having them raised as church-goers?”

  “I was, and I turned out more or less sane.”

  “Less, but still. You get my point. Why would you need to burden Jozette or anybody else by telling them your opinion that God is an unfalsifiable hypothesis?”

  “So how would my going to a church to get married not be a lie?”

  Spunky shook her head. “They don’t make you promise that you believe in God, Elyon. Unless you’re marrying a Catholic, and you’re not. All that you promise is that you’ll love, honor, and cherish her as long as you’re both alive.”

  “How can I promise that? I can’t guess the future.”

  Immediately Spunky remembered Miz Eliza’s sermon on the topic. “Elyon, a promise is not a prediction. A promise means that it is, at this moment, your intention to stay married to and care for Jozette as long as you’re alive. Will that be true, at the moment that you say it?”

  Elyon nodded. “This is serious stuff.”

  “More serious than math,” said Spunky.

  “Nothing is more serious than math,” said Elyon.

  Spunky could not let that go unchallenged. “If human beings did not produce viable offspring and keep them alive until sexual maturity, who would there be on Earth to think about math?”

  But Elyon was lost in his own brooding. “It really is going to make my parents mad. What if you’re wrong and they cut me off without a penny?”

  “Then you’ll scramble and Jozette will scramble and between you you’ll make enough to scrape by on until you get a job using that brilliant mind of yours and you come home with so much cash you can diaper your children with it.”

  So Elyon stayed behind and Spunky put an overnight bag into the van and headed out for the university. It was a long drive and she was already tired, so she stopped at a couple of oases—a Sheetz and a McDonald’s—and walked around the building a couple of times to wake herself up. No caffeine—it didn’t keep her awake, it just gave her a migraine—but the periodic walks were enough. She got to her apartment at the school, saw that her roommate had an overnight visitor, and spent the night on the couch. She didn’t wish for a bed, she didn’t wish for her pillow, she didn’t wish for anything except to wake up and find Eggie somewhere nearby. Kitchen, yard, knocking at the door. Just . . . nearby.

  9

  She didn’t have an appointment with The Professor but she knew perfectly well that if he wanted to see you, he’d see you, and if he didn’t, he’d tell you to make an appointment. No dates would ever work out until he did want to see you. Heretofore Spunky had accepted this is the way a “great man” worked; now it seemed to her to be monstrously narcissistic and borderline sociopathic.

  Control yourself, Delilah, she told herself. He’s the same man whose boots you would have licked upon demand six months ago. He hasn’t changed, and he doesn’t deserve to be despised just because you have.

  The Professor saw her immediately. “I told you to come right back, but . . . did you fly?”

  “I drove back.”

  “‘I’ and not ‘we’?”

  “Elyon is closing up shop. I’ll be back to help him load up the van.”

  “So this really is a flying visit. What’s the urgency?”

  “I did a lot of thinking on the drive up here, and I’m pretty sure you didn’t lie to me at all. You didn’t even conceal very much. We really are collecting way more data than the other places where you have teams gathering samples—”

  “Had. They’re already back.”

  “And you had our data, which you could rely on absolutely because, you know, Elyon.”

  “Obsessively thorough and accurate that boy is, and he chews up the numbers and spits out science.”

  “Ending this grant leaves him broke and jobless,” said Spunky.

  “That’s why I sent unmarried post-docs on this one.”

  “Even single people need to eat and it’s nice to have a warm place to sleep. But don’t worry, he’ll manage, and I agree, you don’t keep a useless project going just to have full employment for grossly underpaid post-docs.”

  “I have to say I admired the work you did for all that gross underpayment,” said The Professor.

  “I admired it too,” said Spunky. “Especially what Elyon kept finding in the GWAS.”

  “Oh? And what do you think he found?”

  “Nothing,” said Spunky.

  “Well, exactly,” said The Professor.

  “Not what lay people mean by ‘nothing,’ of course,” said Spunky. “Because he certainly did not come up with ‘no reliable data.’ Right?”