Love Unedited by Caro Llewellyn

Author:Caro Llewellyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2025-02-04T00:53:20+00:00

Fifteen

AGAIN, SOMEHOW, HE knew her attention had been elsewhere, and he reappeared, offering a grand gesture.

They met at Denver airport, where the terminal was filled with men walking with their kids and two or three wives in tow. It seemed like every family waiting for flights to Salt Lake City had more than one wife in the mix.

‘Stop staring,’ he whispered, but she couldn’t keep her eyes away. ‘I’ve only ever thought about this in the abstract but looking at a family off on a holiday together, it’s even more bizarre.’ The women looked drugged or brainwashed or both.

‘What’s even weirder,’ he said, ‘is that while it’s not exactly legal, having a few wives is accepted, where it’s sanctioned by some Latter-day Saints as part of their religious rights. But, if you’re immigrating to America and you have a few wives, as allowed by your religion in your home country, you can only bring one at a time. To get the next one in, you have to divorce the first.’

They boarded a twelve-seater plane. The flight was meant to be twenty minutes; after an hour of circling, waiting for weather to pass, she had to use the toilet. When she came out, the pilot was waiting. ‘Who’s driving the plane?’ she gasped. They’d been doing doughnuts in the air, surrounded by mountains on all sides, and when she got back to her seat, he told her she looked pale. She held his hand and tried not to look out the window. When she did catch a glimpse, the jagged mountainside seemed close enough to jump to.

A young family had brought their dog on the flight. It was in a large animal crate in the rear of the plane with the luggage, but the aircraft was so small, she could hear its barking and feel its distress, which, along with a screaming baby two rows up from them, added to the tension.

By the time the plane landed, her hands were shaking and when they got to the hotel, he said he was taking her straight to the bar for a shot of tequila. ‘That will set you right,’ he said.

Before they’d agreed to take this fishing trip, he said she had to read A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean. ‘Here,’ he said, handing her a paper bag from Borders bookshop. ‘If you like it, then we’ll go.’

He told her Maclean started writing at seventy and when he sent the manuscript to publishers in New York, he received a slew of rejections. Eventually it was picked up by the University of Chicago Press as the imprint’s first foray into fiction. It went on to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, inspired two movie adaptations, and hadn’t been out of print since.

Edna was entranced by the calm wisdom of the book’s stories and found every beautiful sentence lent itself to careful reading. The pace of it matched the topic. Fly-fishing was slow. The book described the lives of men with modest ambitions, hardened by work and disappointment, and a world where time was unrushed.

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