God.
Portia had balanced her father's five with five of her own, and raised them by traditional standards that did not involve a learning room.
On this birthday evening, they eat a feast at tables on the patio and lawn, and Anthony sits proudly on his special chair. Mitch built it for him to a design sketched by Holly, and she painted it a cheerful red.
'This chair,' she had told Anthony, 'is in memory of a boy who was six years old for fifty years and much loved for fifty-six years. If you ever think that you aren't loved, you will sit in this chair and know you are loved as much as that other Anthony was loved, as much as any boy ever has been loved.'
Anthony, being three, had said, 'Can I have ice cream?' After dinner, there is a portable dance floor on the lawn, and the band is not as woofy as the one at their wedding. No tambourines and no accordion.
Later, much later, when the band has departed and all the guests are gone, when Anthony and Dorothy are sound asleep on the back-porch glider, Mitch asks Holly to dance to the music of a radio, now that they have the entire floor to themselves. He holds her close but not too tight, for she is breakable. As they dance, husband and wife, she puts a hand to his face, as though after all this time she is still amazed that he brought her home to him. He kisses the scar in the palm of her hand, and then the scar in the other. Under a great casting of stars, in the moonlight, she is so lovely that words fail him, as they have so often failed him before. Although he knows her as well as he knows himself, she is as mysterious as she is lovely, an eternal depth in her eyes, but she is no more mysterious than are the stars and the moon and all things on the earth.
About the Author
DEAN KOONTZ is the author of many New York Times bestsellers. He lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Trixie, in southern California.
