Traffic (Complete two-hundred pages) (Moving to Kindle Vella in 30 Days! )

35

DREAM

THAT NIGHT JACK DREAMT ABOUT HIS WIFE. She and he were staying by the lake in their summer home her mother had bought as a present the year before. Her mother always seemed to be making up for the years she hit her foster daughter when Katelyn was a child. Katelyn did not forgive because of the gifts. No matter how many her foster mother sent their way. Instead Katelyn forgave her mother slowly with each passing year because of the books she read. Any book really would soothe her. Self-help, nonfiction, fiction. She read a cookbook straight through once. As a distraction. It didn't make her a better cook that year. Jack could tell you that. It was the cooking classes and cooking shows they would watch as they made Mexican salsas with mango in the cabin that summer three summers ago that made her a better observer of the kitchen and all its mystic powers. Maybe it was the better food or maybe it was the hourly lovemaking. No daughter on the way yet until the last day of the lake cabin summer. Elise would come nine months after they returned from the cabin to LA.

He hadn't heard from anyone all summer. Not even Mr. Golem with an update on international affairs. Nor a mission briefing from the secretary to update Jack on his associates. It was a wonderful summer. And he felt for once he was one person, one identity, at one time. And his dream that night occupied a single picnic blanket on the roof of the cabin. And the fort they made out of a single standing umbrella and two hanging blankets that blocked out the world. They came together endlessly that day. And it was only until they left that fort that they remembered the world wasn't theirs. And Jack remembered he had a whole other world of his own.

Suddenly Jack awoke to a kick in the head. The lights were on in the presidential suite and the rain was falling even harder than before and the wind was still blowing so hard Jack thought he heard a flowerpot crack against the balcony.

"Get up." Raúl was standing over him.