"A mother-daughter twosome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jensen Peter)

EPILOGUE

The novel ends here – but the Walker's story does not.

Ann and Lani left the commune called The Zodiac the very next morning, after having convinced Moses to give them the car keys, and drove straight to South San Francisco. Within two weeks, Ann had given up her job at the Bay Construction Company, and the two had moved to the Midwest, where they hoped to find a secluded haven in which they could ignore the outside world, and concentrate only on themselves. This they did indeed find, in a relatively small town in southern Kansas.

Their past, California and the commune, the traumatic experiences they underwent together, have all been forgotten now, and they live together in a small frame house, each working at small jobs and keeping the house like a pair of loving sisters. The small town they're living in suspects nothing of the beautiful, and yet socially unacceptable relationship that binds them, and Ann and Lani are careful to keep that relationship hidden from the sometimes prying eyes of their neighbors. But life is again joyful for them, after the untold misery of that fateful weekend in Mendocino, and neither of them could be happier.

And what of the future?

As Lani told me in a letter she wrote after reading this manuscript: "Our future is now, and we both know that. Life changes, and people change with it. You ask how long we will be content with our present life? I can only answer that, as of now, the present, we are happy and content, but who knows how tomorrow will find us? We do not make the mistake of building our lives around tomorrow's dreams – we have found that today is enough of a world to live in…"

And so Ann and Lani Walker, mother and daughter, continue, for the time being at any rate, to soar through life on the wings of their special love for each other. It is a love which includes sex, as every true love must; but I, for one, will not judge them on that count. They are living their own lives, free from emotional restraints and inhibitions, aufficient unto themselves, looking into the future without fear, secure in the knowledge that the joy of the present is well worth the insecurity of the future… and how many of us can say the same thing?

Ann and Lani Walker: two small, unimportant people. And yet two inspiring examples of the kind of free, self-sufficient life that beckons us all forward, to test our courage and stamina in the pursuit of its ever receding happiness. Will we ever reach it? Who can say… but perhaps the Walker's story will give some of us the courage we need to keep on trying.