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cars. How do you feel about him giving so much to charitable organizations?”
    Elaina’s grip on my hand loosened a bit, I felt my face heat up, but she said, “Yes, I’m behind him all the way. Now is not the time, and this isn’t the place, for me to go into the pitfalls and evils of the present distribution of wealth in this country, which as you all know is the basis of his book. But I’ll say this; Tom’s beliefs should be irrefutable to anybody who is fair-minded, anybody who is capable of a rational, untainted thought process. Every worker in this country, and all others, should be paid enough to take care of themselves and their families before any corporate profits are taken. He is on the right…”
    “Excuse me, Elaina,” I then said while hitching up my blue jeans a bit, “let me interject one thing. Do any of you people here, in this room, think it’s perfectly fine that corporations raise prices and take larger and larger profits every year while their workers have their incomes and paltry benefits frozen or cut? Is it not sacrilegious that the huge majority of mothers in this country are forced to abandon their babies—their own flesh and blood—in daycare, because their husbands are no longer paid a livable wage? Should big shareholders who have more money than should be legal—shareholders who couldn’t possibly spend their fortunes in thirty lifetimes no matter how hard they tried— get much, much more while the people who work for them can’t afford to fix the holes in their teeth?”
    When the next newsman shouted, “Well what do you think about…?” I waved him off saying, “That’s all we have folks. Elaina and I are very tired. We need to get home.”
    “But Mrs. Soles,” the lady who asked the last question shouted above the now mumbling crowd, “you haven’t answered the second part of my question. How do you feel about your husband giving away most of the money?”
    “I can’t answer that right now,” Elaina said as we leaned our way through the media circus.
    When we finally escaped and headed for the luggage carousel, one last question followed us across the shiny, bustling airport floor, “Although your book may not be fiction, some people are calling it a modern day Grapes of Wrath . Is that a fair assessment?”
    With Elaina still in tow, and neither of us bothering to turn around, I raised a clenched fist high in the air, pumped it a few times, and said, “I’d sure like to think so.”     
    During the cab ride home, Elaina and I didn’t say much. The Middle Eastern driver, looking so stately in his clean white turban on the other side of the bullet-proof glass partition said nothing. For most of the trip, Elaina and I stared out our respective windows seeing little, enduring the gnawing tension hunkered in the back seat between us. Jet-lagged, exhausted, and uneasy, we both ruminated over our conversation on the plane. Silently, we watched the frenzied parkway traffic as if we were in trances.
     
    The falling sun on this fine autumn Sunday afternoon splayed magical light on the towering oaks near Little Neck Bay. Their glowing leaves—gold, orange and crimson—lit up as if neon had replaced their lost chlorophyll. A jumbo jet low overhead roared as it descended toward the tarmac at nearby LaGuardia. Fifteen minutes from home now, Elaina finally said something, but I couldn’t hear with the jet so close to the roof of the cab. When I asked her what she’d said, she just looked at me and slowly rotated her head. Seeing the sadness in her eyes tore at me, and it didn’t let up after she looked back out the window. For the rest of the way home, I tried to think of an amiable compromise, and I came up with a few ideas. I would do almost anything to prevent my Elaina from leaving.
    The funereal ambience continued until the cab turned onto Sampson Avenue. Checking the addresses, the driver slowly motored between the two interminable rows of apartment