for their willingness to live without vacations or home renovations or date nights, all in the service of the Great Idea. The wife who believed ended up rich beyond her dreams, with hobby pursuits like running an eponymous charity or buying the local bookstore in her favorite resort town.
The great man’s battle cry: “None of it would have been possible without her.”
Elisabeth wondered about the failed men, the ones no one talked about. Did their failures have to do with a lack of belief on their wives’ parts, or were success stories written after the fact? Did Steve Jobs’s wife secretly get furious at all that tinkering in the garage and wish he’d go sell insurance with her brother until, poof, he struck gold, and then she could say she knew it, she knew it, she had always known.
“Are you making much progress, sweetheart?” Faye asked Andrew now.
Elisabeth looked at her husband.
“It’s coming together,” he said.
He took a bite of the stroganoff to discourage further questions.
In the early days after they moved, Andrew never stopped talking about his work. One night he came home and announced that a student on his team had calculated that the solar-powered grill had the potential to cook meat three times faster than a charcoal grill. Another night, he had a child’s Christmas-morning grin on his face because he had learned there would be focus groups.
But lately, Andrew had no updates. Maybe he went to work and stared at the Internet all day, which Elisabeth figured was what most people did, and which would be fine with her if he had any sort of job security.
“How about you, Lizzy?” George said. “Has a new book idea come to you yet?”
“Not quite,” she said.
She regretted telling him that she couldn’t figure out what to write about next. George now saw it as yet another way into talking about his favorite subject.
Elisabeth knew what would follow.
“The Hollow Tree,” George said. “I’m telling you. It’s bestseller material. You’d win a Pulitzer Prize.”
“Dad, stop,” Andrew said. “I beg of you.”
In most respects, he had endless tolerance for his parents. At present, the Hollow Tree was the one exception. It wasn’t that anything George said was untrue, but they all recoiled from it because, Elisabeth thought, of the intensity of his delivery. It seemed unhealthy. Not something to be encouraged. Faye said he’d take any excuse to talk about it, no matter whose company he was in. She preferred for Elisabeth and Andrew to change the subject whenever it came up, which it did, every time they saw him.
Last weekend, George had rambled on for half an hour about the importance of subscribing to the local newspaper. He said they needed to get the Gazette if they cared about supporting journalism.
“Elisabeth is a journalist,” Andrew said.
“Yes,” George said. “And?”
“We’ll subscribe to the Gazette eventually,” Andrew said. “It’s not exactly top of mind, Dad. We pay for the Times online and I can barely manage to read that every day.”
Actually, they didn’t pay for the Times. Of course, they saw themselves as the kind of people who would and should and did, but in reality they still used the free login she’d always used at work, out of laziness more than anything.
Elisabeth felt guilty enough without the reminders from George. When they still lived in the city, they got food delivered almost every night for dinner, even after she read an article about how the website they ordered from was killing restaurants. She always meant to tip in cash, because the article said it was the only way to be sure the delivery guy got the money. But many nights, she didn’t have any small bills, so she just added the tip online and hoped for the best, giving the man who arrived at her door an extra-wide smile as she took the warm paper bag from his hands.
Lately, she bought Gil’s clothes and toys online, because there were no good stores nearby, and the few places selling organic baby items downtown were too expensive. Elisabeth justified this by reminding herself that she rarely got food delivered anymore, since the only delivery options here were pizza and Chinese.
She could think of plenty of other things they did right. They didn’t drive an SUV or eat red meat very often. They recycled. They tried their best to be good. If they didn’t have the time to attend protests with George, or sit around chronicling the ills of the world, well,