Planting Iris

Published in Dialogue: The Path and the Gate, An Anthology of Mormon Short Fiction. December 2023

Iris didn’t know she was dead. Why would she? Dying was something she’d never done before. Reclining in the damp grass on an unfamiliar hillside wiggling her bare toes, she felt a vague sense of unease. But she was more concerned about grass stains on this gauzy dress, a lovely cotton voile, she didn’t remember ordering online. Yards of fabric in a billowy skirt simply wasn’t her style. If she felt the need to be dressy, Iris was more inclined to wear pressed linen slacks, a starched shirt, and conservative, gold hoop earrings. Where did this white fluff come from? Edith Wharton?

As the late afternoon sun broke through the clouds, Iris lifted one languid hand to shield her eyes. Stretching her legs, she squinted at wisps of cloud drifting east in a crystal blue sky.  She gazed at the gentle green slope scattered with stones that resembled a child’s alphabet blocks dumped on a braided rug. Something small scuttled in the untrimmed grass next to a gray obelisk. A soft breeze rustled millions of leaves on hundreds of trees. A single barn owl—a baby from the size of him—swooped onto the low hanging branch of a Norway Maple, and soon three other fledglings flew in to crowd next to him. The branch bounced slightly with each arrival. Wide eyes stared at her. Cautiously? She wasn’t sure. 

            Sighing, she shook out her skirt. Where had she parked her car? She searched the grass for her purse, her phone, her To Do list, but no paper, no phone, no purse, no car keys, no balled-up tissue. A twinge of anxiety pricked her abdomen. Stupid phone, always vanishing as though it had an agenda of its own.

She heard the rumble of a car and glanced up the hill. A beige Accord crunched to a stop at the edge of untrimmed grass. The front bumper was dented, a hubcap missing, a side mirror gone. Two people, who clearly had seen better days, opened the doors, tottered over to the crest of the hill, and stood side by side facing west into the sun. Stooped with age, the man grasped a trek pole in each hand to support his spindly legs.   A faded checkered shirt hung on his body. The woman’s hair was dyed the lovely shade of brunette it likely had been when she was twenty, but all that dark brown next to pale paper-thin skin made her puckers and wrinkles stand out in bas relief.

         Fingertips raised to her mouth, Iris stared at them. Hmm? They seemed familiar.  Who were they? Had her past intersected with theirs? When? College?

           A thought sped through her frontal lobe, escaped, and then returned; pamphlets fanned out on a wooden tabletop in the church foyer like a winning hand in a poker game. Were these ancients that adorable young couple in the cover’s glossy photo? What was the title of that pamphlet? Something to do with appropriate hands-off bodies. Was it “Rules for Courtship?”  Antiquated even fifty-five years ago, Iris still smiled at the phrase and remembered her cheeks burning and her chest heaving, as she made for the exterior church doors as quickly as possible, just short of a sprint. Her ecclesiastical leader had just finished probing her and her fiancé with a ponderous series of questions leading to his denouement.

“Have you fondled each other’s bodies?”  He had cast them a withering look.

 The wedding, a week from Friday, hung in precarious balance, but it was a stupid question because she and Harris were healthy, in love, and itching to do more than just fondle. Had this man ever been young and desperately in love? How old was he anyway? Was he the last surviving member of the 1847 migration? After staring over the top of his thick tri-focals for what felt like an hour, the stake president withdrew a fountain pen hidden in some interior pocket of his suitcoat and scribbled his name on the slip of paper with an exaggerated sigh as though he were compromising his own salvation.

As Iris pressed her hip against the metal bar on the door, why the splay of pamphlets caught her eye is anyone’s guess, but she snatched one off the table. Fanning herself, she turned toward her fiancé, who was stifling an anxious laugh.

            “I can’t believe any of this.” She waved the glossy couple in his face. “It’s ridiculous.”

             “Why didn’t you give him your best horrified look and say Of course not!” Harris, her adorable fiancé, was all about expediency.

But Iris hadn’t. She couldn’t. The absurd tone of the man’s voice, or his steely grey hair, or that striped tie holding his wrinkled skin in place had provoked her. Iris had looked straight at the man and huffed,

“Are you kidding?” 

Sitting in the car moments later, she glanced at the pamphlet before she balled it into wad, rolled down the window, and chucked it in the bushes.

“Who believes this tripe?”

“Who cares?” Harris said. “He signed it. We’re good to go.” His relief was palpable even if his smile was weak. For a few horrible minutes, he must have contemplated explaining to thirty of his closest friends, curious neighbors, and parents, why his temple marriage--embossed on four hundred announcements--was going to be substituted with an embarrassing fifteen-minute ceremony in the Relief Society room. No one would have needed an explanation. His blush would have explained the situation in delicious detail.

The trauma of that long-ago interview must have disrupted a tiny cluster of cells in Iris’s amygdala and created a memory she couldn’t suppress, because twenty years later walking down the aisle in a new ward in a new city with her wild crew of four children, Iris recognized the dewy-eyed couple from the cover of the pamphlet. They certainly had changed. Of course, they had changed. Eight children in various shapes, sizes, and stages of orthodontia would stretch any set of parents past the limits of human endurance and significantly alter waist sizes and the distribution of hair.

The male half of the couple, Willard Kimball, because that was the man’s name, never touched a microphone he didn’t caress. His fingers stroked that cold metal as if he could bring the thing to life.  The first Sunday of each month, Will spoke in hushed tones tinged with humility and gratitude. The time of year might change, but his message stayed the same, Will was connected to greatness. “Sitting on my grandfather’s knee—he was an apostle even then—I felt his love for me, but it was more than love, it was strength. He was in his eighties, but that strength never failed him.” Will clenched his fist as though he were flexing spiritual muscles of his own. Iris stifled a groan.

When Will finally made bishop, he had more opportunities for heartfelt revelations. “Each of us has serious challenges,” He leaned into the mic. “but when those challenges seem too heavy to bear, think of my great-grandfather burying his little boy, his first-born son, in a shallow grave near the North Platte. There was a terrible cholera epidemic. His family was sick, exhausted. There was no feed for the animals. The water was putrid. His oxen near death, my great-grandfather put his worn hands on that animal’s head and blessed it. ‘Rise,’ he commanded. ‘Bring my children to Zion.’” Will raised both hands shoulder height. “In his first talk in the Bowery, Brother Brigham spoke of my great-grandfather’s faith. Blessing an animal, leading his company, leaving his son’s grave, and on to Zion.” Will’s lips quivered, and for a moment he was too moved to speak. He wiped a tear from his cheek with the back of his hand. “We are the legacy of those pioneers. The reason for their sacrifice.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We must become a Zion people.”

Iris swallowed hard, as her daughter, Emily, whispered, “The Bish needs new material.”

 Will lowered his hands and squeezed the sides of the podium, then he leveled his gaze at the congregation. “I’m not asking for volunteers to rescue handcart pioneers on the wrong side of the Sweetwater River. Nope. A hundred percent home teaching won’t risk anyone’s life but think of the weary souls we can save.” He gave the light coming through the window a beatific smile as though his grandfather were feeding him the lines.

“Yup,” Emily whispered, “he wants to win the stake percentages game.”

One dreary Sunday afternoon, the skies were gray and the meeting was dull, Iris glanced at her wristwatch. Bro Kimball had been droning on for seven long minutes. She closed her eyes. An image flitted into her head: a character from David Copperfield, Uriah Heep, announcing his humility at every opportunity but was in reality, a fake, a sham, a virtuous imposter.  She sat up straighter on the wooden bench and considered Bro. Kimball from the safety of the last row in the center section.  Iris was generally empathetic enough to make allowances for human imperfections, but after three years of eves-dropping over the backyard fence--as Will sniped at his wife and boasted about his children--something in Iris snapped.

She stared at the man’s head, not as a collection of skin, nostrils, green eyes, teeth etc., but as a gigantic red balloon. Suddenly this man’s excessive estimation of his foreordained superiority tipped the scales against him. It didn’t occur to Iris that she held a figurative pin between her thumb and index finger. Not yet.

Male privilege was an irritation Iris had long endured, sometimes cheerfully with a degree of acquiescence, sometimes not. She shared her life with a neurosurgeon, Harris Jensen, who had an ingrained sense of entitlement bequeathed by fifteen years of training, subservient nurses, and heartfelt gratitude from patients whose brains he salvaged. Scrounging for a glioblastoma, Harris wasn’t averse to flecks of blood spattering his glasses but taking out the trash or changing a diaper was beneath his level of expertise.  Truth be told—or not told—her husband wasn’t much of a believer, but his solid presence on the stand in numerous bishoprics, added a sense of gravitas that the real estate developers and retired orthodontists in the congregation relied upon.

 I’m not an appendage,” Iris growled on more than one occasion, not some mindless woman basking in the glory of her high-status male.  As the years passed, she became increasing impatient with the notion of male hierarchy that left her teaching toddlers in the nursery, while Harris sat smiling benevolently on the stand. Now, seated beside Harris was that face from the pamphlet worming his way up the ladder, Will Kimball, bishop extraordinaire.

The summer Iris’s daughter turned sixteen, she and an equally foolish male friend, ran away to join the circus--actually Earth Day protests. They traversed the western states waving posters and chanting slogans—The Planet’s in Danger!--at every opportunity. But they failed to communicate their location or wellbeing to frantic parents. That dreadful summer that lasted eons and eons, Bishop Kimball, secure in the location of his own troop of well-behaved progeny, never encountered Iris without whispering, "Any word?"

Emily called her parents the day before school began, requested a plane ticket home, arrived unrepentant, and refused to bathe more than once a week.

“It’s a waste of water,” she said.

“You’re a little smelly by Friday,” her mother responded.

              Water conservation was her daughter’s excuse. Notoriety was the result, that and profound parental shame.

After her daughter’s return and liberal transformation, Kimball couldn’t resist whispering, “How’s Emily?” at every opportunity. The satisfied expression on his face implied that Iris’s brilliant daughter had slipped from the honor roll into a life of prostitution.  He reveled in his own daughters’ innate superiority and Young Women’s trajectory toward virtue and a temple wedding. That face Iris had first encountered on the tri-folded pamphlet, gave her smiles that felt more like smirks, and the occasional remark, “How are things on the home front?” as though a battle with sin were being waged at Iris’s front door.  At least once a week, Will would touch her arm and smile as though they shared a private joke, an awareness that she and her handsome husband were not the solid citizens they pretended to be.

Perhaps the situation would have continued indefinitely if the stake president had not exhibited symptoms--multiple twitches, jerks and spasms—that suggested a brain tumor of his own. A CT scan confirmed it. Brain surgery and his release from the presidency were imminent. The subsequent Tuesday evening in the hushed confines of a bishopric meeting, Bishop Kimball raised his eyebrows significantly before his solemn whispered announcement,

 “I’m going to be called as the next stake president.”  Neither of his startled counselors or the executive secretary questioned the source of his riveting announcement, but later in the quiet of their king-sized bed, Harris confided in Iris and rolled his eyes.

“Will went on to say, we had some loose ends that needed to be tied up, as he expected the call before the weekend.” Harris leaned over and slid her nightgown off her shoulder.  “Don’t say anything.”

“Of course not.” Iris blinked innocently. “Not a word.”

To the surprise of the entire neighborhood who’d learned of the Kimball confirmation via whispered asides over backyard fences, Christmas arrived early in the form of a skinny widower, Bernard Boushka, the new stake president.  Boushka, who always wore long sleeved white shirts to cover tattoos inked fifty-four years earlier, was not a person anyone would have considered as stake president material.  He intimated, to small groups of friends, that he and his shipmates had imbibed; and if not under the influence, he would never have consented to having a buxom Polynesian etched on his forearm, but there you are. “Young men away from home,” he smiled. “What can you do?” And then he’d laugh about his shirt sleeves, “The last thing I want to do is sunburn Leilani.”

Three months into Boushka’s new calling, he shortened stake planning meetings by half an hour. Linger Longers had to include a dessert table. He didn’t reinstitute missionary farewells, but he did invite young sojourners to join him on the stand to receive a “good luck, you’re going to need it” send off from the congregation that included a hearty rendition of Called to Serve and a congregational salute. 

In early May, President Boushka appeared unannounced at Iris’s front door moments after twelve or thirteen girls arrived for Activity Day. She couldn’t resist eyeing the paper sack Pres. Boushka was carrying stuffed with ten-foot sections of twisted Manila rope.  Smiling broadly, Iris stepped aside. “President Boushka, please join us.” She gave the girls a quick nod of her head, indicating they should abandon painting watering cans and move to the couches in the family room.

The president dumped the load of rope in the middle of the Persian rug woven in deep shades of purple and teal. At first glance the rope resembled a loose collection of snakes, but President Boushka snatched a length of rope, and right before thirteen sets of incredulous eyes, he whipped the rope into a Bowline Knot.  Moving more slowly, he did it again. Setting the knots side-by-side, he smiled. “Would you like to learn how to tie a Sheepshank?”

The girls were delighted, and for the next forty minutes, young fingers worked under the man’s supervision until each girl could successfully tie the Bowline Knot, and a few mastered the Sheepshank. Iris inched her way over on the couch until she was crowding the older man’s left elbow.

“President,” Since he was sitting on her couch, Iris kept it casual. “your grandchildren must think you’re wonderful.” She was fishing, and perhaps he knew it, or perhaps he’d been questioned so many times his reply was down pat.

“My first wife couldn’t have children. My second wife loaned me hers, but when she died, I had to return them.”

“I’m sorry.” Iris felt foolish for asking, but alternately, wondered why his marital information wasn’t available on the whispered stake hot line. She said as much to her husband while she was reheating the dinner he’d missed.

“President Boushka isn’t married.”

Harris nodded.

“You never mentioned that to me.”

“It’s no one’s business.”

“I don’ t think of myself as some indiscriminate no one.” She leaned forward until she was hovering above his plate. “He’s not your typical stake president.”

“He’s not orthodox. That’s for sure.”

Iris and Harris had been married twenty-five years, and she could intuit when he was withholding pertinent information.  She’d also learned if she posed a question and sat quietly, her husband would start to meander and eventually divulge what he’d been thinking.

“Why do you suppose they chose him? You know, the powers-that-be?” She pushed her chair back. “Can I get you another slice of quiche?”

He avoided her eyes, but finally said, “I was sitting next to Will at a stake meeting, and I noticed Lambert’s twitches.  I said--in a completely inappropriate manner—that if I didn’t know better, I’d think Lambert might have a tumor. And then the poor guy did.” Harris daubed at his mouth with a wadded napkin. “I could be completely wrong,” In Iris’s experience, these qualifiers were employed when her husband thought he was completely right. “but I bet Will started placing a few strategic calls to family connections to discover who was assigned to our next stake conference.  Putting himself on the radar screen. But honestly, I’m thrilled anyone is willing to do the job, let alone campaign for it.”

“But he wasn’t chosen,” Iris sighed, assuming God took a dim view of kibitzing.

“Nope,” Harris nodded, “My guess is Lambert felt nudged out and suspected Will was doing the nudging.” His eyebrows rose and fell. Payback. Had Lambert given Kimball the kibosh in one of those preconference closed door sessions?

“Will’s embarrassed,” Harris said.  “He staked his claim too many times.” 

Iris smiled. “Well, everyone just loves Bro. Boushka.”

“Not everyone.” Her husband gave her a significant look over his stylish circular glasses.

“No?” Iris said almost under her breath.

“Will’s taking notes.”

Six months later, those notes were discretely relayed to church central after Bro. Boushka canceled the stake conference meeting on Saturday night.  The meeting is redundant, he’d said. He encouraged the brethren to take their wives on a date instead.

After Will’s discreet phone call to an old missionary companion/fraternity brother/cousin/executive secretary in the Church Office Building, Will quietly revealed in bishopric meeting a disturbing pattern of events: the Seventy who’d called Bro. Boushka to be Stake President was suffering from dementia, and the result was questionable calls—five in fact—similar to the delightful President Boushka.  In a month or two, the situation was discretely rectified. Pres. Boushka and his tattoos were released behind closed doors.

The subsequent Sunday was stake conference, and to no one’s surprise, Willard Kimball was called to serve. Before Kimball could resume his love affair with the mic at the podium, a sustaining vote needed to be taken. Most hands, young, old, male, female, trembling and upright, were raised, with one unnoticed exception. Unnoticed until the clean-shaven seventy standing at the podium asked, as a matter of routine and not expectation, if anyone was opposed.

The chapel was silent, as Iris stood slowly in her three-inch heels. Her right arm extended above her head in a graceful gesture that resembled a ballerina exercising at the bar. Heads positioned in the front rows swiveled a hundred and eighty degrees to stare. The resulting collective gasp reduced available oxygen in the chapel by half. Whispers rustled down the pews and through the rows of folding chairs in the gym. Harris shriveled on the bench beside her.

Sister Raddish, an elderly woman on the second row, stood and spoke as if stake conference had suddenly become Fast and Testimony Meeting.  “I agree with Iris. No offense Will, but it is what it is.” A dozen women scattered through the chapel—no men—stood without speaking as the white-faced visiting authority leaned into the microphone.

“Would everyone who has an opposing vote, please meet me in the Relief Society room. Now would be good.” And the large man lumbered off the stand grinding the meeting to an uneasy halt.

Fortunately, Will Kimball had not rushed to take his place on the stand. Instead, he twisted around to glare at Iris. As she stood gathering her scriptures and her lavender cardigan, his eyes narrowed to slits and his wife hissed. And that was the beginning of the end.

Moments later, resting one hip on the edge of the table in the Relief Society room, the visiting authority sighed, “Will someone please explain what’s going on.”

During her march down the hall, Iris organized the thoughts spinning in her head. She answered quietly, “Religion and ambition are antithetical. Bro. Kimball’s campaign for stake president is a perversion of everything we hold dear.” The dozen women in the room nodded in silence.

The last thing this good man expected when he left home that morning was to preside over a female insurrection. Every feature on his face groaned, what next? In his head Common Consent was a concept, not a reality.

               Harris responded much the same way after fifteen minutes of fraught silence in the car ride home. The opening garage door rumbled as he turned toward Iris. “Have you lost your mind? Ambition and religion have been sleeping together for eons. Will would have kept the trains running on time. Why do you care?”  He didn’t follow her into the house. Rolling down the car window, he said, “Hospital.”

            Iris stalked into the family room. A half smile edging across her face, Emily lounged on the couch with her legs propped on the ottoman and her phone in her hand.

            “Truth to power, Mom?”

            “I didn’t say anything.”

            “You said plenty. It was just non-verbal.”

            Iris sighed.

            Her daughter sat contemplating her mother. “The interesting question is why? Why blow up your world?”

Poisoning Will’s well was not what Iris intended; no indeed, that morning as she struggled to locate a missing hoop earring, she had no thought of initiating an insurrection, scuttling Will’s immaculate used car dealership, unraveling his standing in the ward, or planting the seeds that eventually caused his four humiliated sons to refuse mission calls to foreign locales. But that is, in fact, what occurred.

When the for-sale sign appeared in front of the Kimball’s white central hall colonial, Iris experienced waves of guilt that passed from her chest into her stomach at unpredictable intervals. She reassured herself that she’d told the truth, and she certainly wasn’t the only person offended by Will’s blatant ambition.

 Now, thirty-plus years later, here she was, sitting in damp grass as Will Kimball hobbled his way to crest of the hill, then in a fierce gesture, he brandished one pole at the firmament as though he could puncture it. His wife, Iris couldn’t remember her name—maybe Gabby, maybe Mary Jo--was hanging onto the back of Kimball’s shirt as he headed down the hill. The guy had to be eighty, but no holding him back. His spindly legs picked up speed before his hands could position the poles.

            “Slow down,” his wife gasped.

            “I need to be sure,” he shouted swinging a pole in Iris’s general direction. “She needs to pay.”

 Pay? Iris braced for an ugly confrontation. She’d expected one for years, rehearsed well considered replies, and practiced calm expressions in the bathroom mirror while flossing her teeth.

            Will’s wife bared her own teeth and shouted, “She’s dead. Dead. She can’t pay for anything.”

            Who was dead? Iris looked over her shoulder toward the bottom of the hill. No one was in sight.

            “I need to see for myself,” he wheezed, struggling for breath.

            “You saw the obit. Let it go.” His wife didn’t say, “You old fool,” but it was there in her voice.

            Where was the man going? Willard Kimball seemed determined to reach the bottom of the slope and a lovely rose-colored granite marker Iris recognized, because she’d selected it herself at Nu-art Memorials. Each spring on her wedding anniversary, May twenty-first, Iris deposited a bouquet of daisies in a disposable pot in front of the stone’s stylish script, Harris Jensen and Iris Cannon Jensen, side-by-side with the appropriate dates beneath. Iris squinted. Two dates were carved beneath her name.

A second date? Iris gasped. Impossible! She wasn’t ready to be dead. Will didn’t glance her way or alter his course. He can’t see me. The realization was brief, vivid, and unsparing. Time slowed. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, but more tears rolled down her cheeks. Dead, she whispered, what a waste.

With rickety legs that looked like a praying mantis in freefall, Will Kimball came barreling down the hill. His ancient toe suddenly caught the edge of a flat marker, Beloved Mother, and he lost what was left of his grip on the poles. He flew into the air, like a beginning skier, legs, poles, arms flailing, until his head slammed into the adjacent gray granite obelisk with a solid thud. Blood spurted out his left nostril and seconds later more red blood dribbled from his ear. He wheezed loudly, his left leg jerked, and then Willard Kimball was eerily silent. His wife sank onto the grass, pulled her phone from her pocket, and touched 911, but it was too late. Iris knew it. Willard’s wife knew it. Her wails launched a half dozen birds into the air. She didn’t race down the slope. The poor thing was too traumatized to move.

Seconds later Iris’s skin prickled.  Something disturbed the air behind her. She turned slowly. Dressed in stark white with a jaunty bow tie, fresh-faced Willard Kimball sat in the grass six feet from Iris’s left elbow.

“This is your fault,” he bellowed. “Everything is your fault!” Hot words gushed from his mouth, every injustice, every stolen opportunity, every ache, every pain. He folded his arms across his chest, as if he were prepared to go on indefinitely, but after a ten-minute spew, his torrent slowed to a trickle.

Iris rolled her eyes. The poor dope didn’t realize he’s dead. Couldn’t he see his body lying twenty feet away? Couldn’t he see the globs of fresh blood?

With a yelp, Will gave her a shove that tumbled her into the damp grass. “You’re not listening!”

Iris sat up with as much decorum as she could muster and brushed a few dead leaves out of her hair.

“Listen Will, I hate to be the one to tell you, but you’re dead. I’m pretty sure we both are.” The argument they’d never had welled up in Iris’s chest. No holding her tongue. She needed to have that final last word. Will’s hubris had messed up his life. His disasters didn’t belong to her.

But then Iris noticed a man approaching from the east, hovering actually, a tall man wearing a short sleeved white shirt with a lovely Polynesian girl tattooed on his forearm.  Who was beside him in a shimmering white muumuu with a white carnation lei draped around her shoulders? Leilani? 

Iris waited for some pronouncement, something monumental to cause the leaves to quake and the headstones to tremble, but Bro. Boushka just stood with the suggestion of a smile on his lips. A soft thought invaded Iris’s head, None of this matters. Ambition. Being right. Being wrong. Male. Female. Affluence. Poverty. Up. Down.  It was all just dust in the wind. What did matter? Iris didn’t know, but she stood feeling the world was a more hospitable place. One thing was certain, Willard Kimball was no longer on her list of wrongs that needed to be righted. She turned toward Will.

 He shrugged, “It’s okay. You’re forgiven.” Then he strode back up the hill and placed a translucent hand on his sobbing wife’s shoulder.

She glanced at Bro. Boushka and mouthed thanks.

He smiled, you’re welcome, and nodded toward the rose-colored granite stone at the bottom of the hill.

How had she missed this younger version of Harris leaning against the marker? He gave her a sly smile and stretched out his hand. The white surgical scrubs he was wearing looked starched, Harris Jensen MD embroidered in red on the pocket. Iris had to laugh. Maybe some things never changed.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he called. “I’m sorry about that car.”

She took a few steps and shook out her skirt. “What car?”

“The silver Mercedes that hit you on South Temple and E Street.  You weren’t paying attention.” Then magically, he was by her side holding her tightly against his chest. “I’ve missed you,” he whispered into her mass of white hair.  “You need to be more careful.”

“Why? Can a person die twice?”

And he laughed, that adorable, charming laugh she loved. She pushed her nose into the chest hair above his scrubs’ V neck and smelled his cologne, something she had done at least a million times. 

Leaning against their rose-colored marker, they sat on the grass laughing and talking like a couple of kids falling in love until the sun sank in a glorious display of hot pink and orange.

Harris grasped her hand. “Time to go.”

She blinked a couple of times. “Where?”

“Birds migrate at night using the stars to navigate,” he said. “So, will we.”  

By Annette Haws