Fox Island by Stephen Bly Page B

to survival.
     
    It still is.
     
    “It’s way too cluttered, that’s all,” Tony
insisted.
    Price pulled her hair back into a large
comb. Her prescription computer glasses dropped to her chest, held
by the Navajo beaded strap around her neck. She rubbed her neck
muscles, yawned, and glanced around the room. “What’s too
cluttered?”
    Tony eased beside her on the blue-flowered
couch, then yanked out several throw pillows lodged in the small of
his back. “Chapter five, of course. That’s what I’ve been
reading.”
    “Do you mean parts of it, or the whole
thing?” The soft wave of her hair emphasized her raised
eyebrows.
    “Well, in the first place, it’s twenty-nine
pages long. We need to cut it to twenty-five pages. Here, I’ve
redlined some things I think we can delete.”
    Price pulled the pages out of his hand and
flipped through them. “What is this?” She sat straight and tall on
the full base of her authority as a seasoned university
professor.
    Tony Shadowbrook cradled his stocking feet
into her lap. “You’ll have to admit there is such a thing as too
much detail. Didn’t we talk that through last summer in Utah?”
    Price squeezed out from under his legs and
stood to gaze out the living room window. A lone sailboat gently
bobbed in the waters in the distance. “I do remember a very heated
discussion.”
    “And what was our conclusion? That we would
jam in all the details, then thin it out a tad to make sure the
material still retained its crispness.”
    Price leaned against the windowsill and
tucked a hand under her chin. She brushed her lips and noticed they
were chapped again. “I recall that it concluded in your buying me
those cloisonné earrings and a dozen roses.”
    A grin broke across Tony’s face, then
receded as quickly as the tide. “Yeah, well, that’s what I did in
chapter five... I thinned it out a tad.”
    “A tad? In places you clear-cut it. If it
were a forest, it would be an environmental disaster.”
    “But it’s right at twenty-five pages, and I
believe it reads pretty good.”
    She spread the twenty-five double-spaced
typed pages in a fan on his legs, still sprawled full length on the
couch. “Why was all the ‘thinning’ done on the part I wrote?”
    “That’s not true. I didn’t even consider who
wrote the original. If it needed to be chopped, I chopped it.”
    “I find it rather amazing that it’s always
my additions that need to be deleted.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Look... look... right here on page 123. See? I was describing the
difference be¬tween loganberries, blackberries and boysenberries.
But it’s not needed, so out it went.”
    “Show me one other place.”
    “What?”
    “Where’s one other place in the chapter
where you removed your own work?”
    Tony shuffled through the pages. “Here! How
about this? ‘The pink cotton candy newborn clouds hung like wash on
the baby blue sky.’ I took that out too.”
    “That was my line.”
    “It was?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh. Well, I’m sure there’s more.” Tony
sorted through the chapter, then began again.
    “Good morning, Shadowbrooks. I’m headed for
Mom’s to make some phone calls. Need anything from the store?”
Melody swung into the room, her teeth shining whiter than ever.
    “Not really, thanks.” Price dropped into the
navy side chair. She ran her finger over the glass ginger jar front
of the lamp stuffed with shells and starfish and traced the
scalloped shells motif on the footed resin base.
    She told Tony four years ago he wasn’t the
kind to co-write anything. She knew this would happen again. And
they had five more summers of this? They couldn’t even fight in
peace. Next year, no kids. No house guests. No interruptions. Just
the two of them, slugging it out.
    “I’m going after Lloyd Bennington today.
I’ll try the Airport Hilton and see if I can get his phone number
from them. I’ve got a friend who works at the desk part-time. What
was the name