Dion was singing "Abraham, Martin, and John" on the radio.
Jeff was making breakfast.
When Dion got to the part about Bobby, Jeff took the egg he was about to crack and threw it against the wall. Then he did the same with another. Then he took the whole box and smashed it on the floor, and stomped on it for good measure.
He was still mopping up the mess and crying when Laura walked in a few minutes later.
"Honey! What's wrong?"
Jeff shook his head, said nothing. They'd been over this before. He had to steel himself against this kind of thing. He'd never make it to 1986 if he broke down every time he heard a song about an assassination he could have stopped. But there was something about that last verse--
Laura pulled him up into her arms, kissed his neck, drew his arms around her.
"I still have egg on my hands--"
"It's ok, baby," she said. "Shhh, it's ok." She kissed him again.
"It's just that last verse." Jeff said. "I don't think 'Abraham, Martin, and John' was originally written that way--with the verse about Bobby. They just tacked it on, after he was killed. That's why his name's not in the title. It's bad enough I was here when JFK and now Martin Luther King were murdered, and I did nothing--"
"You tried with JFK," she said. She stroked his head. "It wasn't your fault."
"I tried and I failed," Jeff said. "And now Bobby. If his name wasn't in the song at first, maybe he wasn't supposed to die. Maybe I, we, were supposed to save him. And I did nada--nothing!"
"We've got to stay focused on the Challenger," Laura said.
"I know," Jeff replied.
"That's the key to all of this," she continued. "If we don't stop it from crashing into that schoolhouse in Florida and killing all of those kids..."
Jeff knew she was right. Nothing else mattered compared to changing that reality from his timeline to Laura's, from a world in which the space program died a final death to one in which just the astronauts died in the Challenger, and the space program limped along and took wing again in the following decades. Still...
"It's just--this has been one lousy year, event-wise," Jeff said. He looked at the calendar on the refrigerator. It was on its last page--December, 1968. He'd be glad to pull it down and throw it in the trash with the rest of the year.
"Well, at least we'll have Apollo 8 circling the moon this Christmas, and Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon next year," Laura said.
"Yeah," Jeff said, "and Nixon in office. He'll throttle the Apollo program barely out of its cradle, and then give the Shuttle such poor funding that it's amazing it didn't blow up long before 1986."
"We'll just have to do something about that, then, won't we," Laura said.
Jeff hugged her, eggy hands and all, and thought, yeah, and maybe we can still do more than that too.
)
