you could carry it on the plane, if you packed it," Brendan
said. They rummaged around and found a shipping box just large enough
for the painting and the drawing.

"Good idea," Joe said. "Now I even have the money to frame it. How are
you doing these days, by the way?"

"Not bad. I'm teaching a course at a community college. Of course, the
bay area is expensive. Wheeler's making the big bucks. It's a full time
job just keeping him out of trouble, making sure he eats right, and so
on." Brendan grinned. "I can't imagine what the house is going to be
like when I get back. Wheeler hasn't put anything away since he was
born. He just picks things up and carries them to different places."

"Creative chaos," Joe said.

"Great, until you need the garlic press."

"I'm with you," Joe said. "I hate looking for things. Wheeler is an
excellent fellow, though." He pictured Wheeler, very tall, hawk nosed,
wearing glasses, bent over an architectural drawing, the top of his
head seeming to glow.

"Oh, I couldn't survive without him," Brendan said, taking another
swallow of Laphroaig. "He was a hard man, our father. Maybe you didn't
know, not having lived with him and all."

"I suppose so," Joe said. "Did he give you a hard time when you, umm,
came out?"

"No," Brendan said, "he was fine about that. 'Whatever works,' he said.
It was the art thing--that any other way of life was less worthy.
Helping in the community, working with people, he couldn't see that as
important. It wouldn't have been, for him, I guess." Brendan shrugged.
"I can draw, you know. But I never got off on it." Joe reached out and
patted him on the back, not knowing what to say.

They went into the house, and Joe packed the drawing with the oil
painting. He put the box on the back seat of the rental car and stopped
to pick a few strawberries from the patch of everbearing plants by the
end of the barn.

"I love those strawberry plants," he said to Ann in the kitchen.
"October and they're still working."

"Your father loved them, too."

Joe prowled around the bookshelves and found an Arthur W. Upfield
mystery that he hadn't read. "Great stuff," he said later, as they ate
a light dinner of soup and salad. "Off to yet another corner of
Australia while Napoleon Bonaparte gets his man."

"The keen senses of the aboriginal combined with the rational faculties
of the white man," Brendan said.

_Death of a Lake_ is the one I remember," Ann said. "Year after y