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file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Stephen%20King%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htmAmerican Express Gold Card right up there beside his checkbook.None of this had been a promising first step toward good relations with the future in-laws.In the end Rachel had brought them around (after each man had had a chance to repent of the things hehad said, although neither of them had ever changed his mind in the slightest about the other). There wasno more melodrama, certainly no dismally theatrical from-this-day-forward-I-have-no-daughter scene.Goldman would have probably suffered through Rachel’s marriage to the Creature from the BlackLagoon before denying her. Nevertheless the face rising above the collar of Irwin Goldman’s morningcoat on the day Louis married Rachel had greatly resembled the faces sometimes seen carved onEgyptian sarcophagi. Their wedding present had been a six-place setting of Spode china and amicrowave oven. No money. For most of Louis’s harum-scarum med school days, Rachel had worked asa clerk in a women’s apparel store. And from that day to this day, Rachel only knew that things had beenand continued to be “tense” between her husband and her parents . . . particularly between Louis and herfather.Louis could have gone to Chicago with his family, although the university schedule would have meantflying back three days earlier than Rachel and the kids. That was no great hardship. On the other hand,four days with Im-Ho-Tep and his wife the Sphinx would have been.The children had melted his in-laws a good deal, as children often do. Louis suspected that he himselfcould have completed the rapprochement simply by pretending he had forgotten that evening inGoldman’s study. It wouldn’t even matter that Goldman knew he was pretending. But the fact was (andhe at least had the guts to be up front about it with himself) that he did not quite want to make therapprochement. Ten years was a long time, but it was not quite long enough to take away the slimy tastethat had come into his mouth when, in Goldman’s study over glasses of brandy, the old man had openedone side of that idiotic smoking jacket and removed the checkbook residing within. Yes, he had feltrelief that the nights—five of them in all— that he and Rachel had spent in his narrow, saggingapartment bed had not been discovered, but that surprised disgust had been quite its own thing, and theyears between then and now had not changed it.He could have come, but he preferred to send his father-in-law his grandchildren, his daughter, and amessage.The Delta 727 pulled away from the rampway, turned. . . and he saw Ellie at one of the front windows,waving frantically. Louis waved back, smiling, and then someone—Ellie or Rachel— hiked Gage intothe window. Louis waved, and Gage waved back—perhaps seeing him, perhaps only imitating Ellie.“Fly my people safe,” he muttered, then zipped his coat and went out to the parking lot. Here the windwhined and zoomed with force enough to almost tear his hunter’s cap off his head, and he clapped ahand to it. He fumbled with his keys to unlock the driver’s side door of his car and then turned as the jetrose beyond the terminal building, its nose tilted upward into the hard blue, its turbos thundering.file:///E|/Funny%20&%20Weird%20Shit/75%20-%20Ste...%20Books/Stephen%20King%20-%20Pet%20Sematary.htm (89 of 333)7/28/2005 9:21:49 PM