4 What Would Lincoln Do

Chapter 4 WHAT WOULD LINCOLN DO? "What are we gonna do now?" Pep asked her brother as the happy newlyweds drove away. "I don't know," Coke said glumly. "Why do you think Aunt Judy would marry a monster like Dr. Warsaw?" Pep asked. "Why did Eva Braun marry Hitler?" Coke replied. "Why did Osama Bin Laden have three wives? Why do murderers get marriage proposals in prison? Some women like bad guys." Standing just ten feet away, their mother could no longer hold back her tears—of happiness. "Didn't Aunt Judy look beautiful?" Mrs.

McDonald gushed, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. "I can't believe my little sister is married. She was radiant. And what a great guy! She and Hermy look so happy together." Hermy. To Coke and Pep, his nickname sounded like a disease. "He seems like a nice fella," agreed Dr. McDonald. "I like the way he got down off that wheelchair and helped Pep after she fainted. Not many people would do that. He must have had a lot of experience taking care of kids." Coke and Pep looked at each other in disbelief. "Yeah," Coke said, "I bet he's taken care of a lot of kids." Mrs. McDonald blew her nose into a handkerchief and seemed to be regaining her composure. "I feel so sorry for Hermy," she said. "Judy told me he had an accident recently. He broke just about every bone in his body. That's why he was in a wheelchair."

"What happened?" asked Dr. McDonald. "He took a bad fall." Coke leaned over to whisper in Pep's ear. "Not bad enough." After several more minutes, the grown-ups had finished chit-chatting, performing air kisses, and making false promises to stay in touch with each other. The wedding guests started to go their separate ways. Dr. McDonald led the family up the steps for a closer look at the Lincoln Memorial. When they reached the top, the twins stared up in wonder, like every other tourist visiting the shrine for the first time. It isn't until you get close to the statue of our sixteenth president that you realize how imposing it is.

"It's nineteen feet high," Coke told the family, "and it weighs 175 tons. The sculptor's name was Daniel Chester French." "Get a life, Mr. Know-It-All," said Pep. "Be nice to your brother," warned Mrs. McDonald. It's not easy growing up with a twin who knows everything. From a very young age, Coke had been blessed with an eidetic—or photographic—memory. Whether he wanted to or not, he could remember virtually everything he ever read, saw, or heard. To some people, that made Coke an interesting and informed

young man. To others, he was an obnoxious blowhard. Sometimes it seemed like his mouth was an endless fountain of useless information, a human search engine with no delete button. Dr. McDonald smiled quietly. As a professor of American history at San Francisco State University, he took a secret delight in Coke's mental prowess. "French's original plan called for the statue to be ten feet tall," he informed the others, "but he made it bigger so Lincoln wouldn't be dwarfed by his own monument." The parents went to read the inscriptions that were carved in the north and south chambers of the memorial. The twins continued staring at Lincoln, who looked down at them with sad eyes. "Did you know that five weeks after he became president, the Civil War began?" Coke told his sister. "And then, five days after the war was over, he was assassinated." "It kinda makes our little everyday problems

seem trivial," Pep said. "People have been trying to assassinate us too," Coke reminded her. "That doesn't seem trivial to me." He was right, and Pep knew it. She couldn't stop looking at the statue. It was like she was trying to make eye contact with a block of marble. "What do you think Lincoln would do?" Pep finally asked her brother, "I mean, if he was in our shoes?" "I wish I knew," he muttered. They walked around the memorial to read the inscriptions on the walls. Coke and Pep were both familiar with the Gettysburg Address ("Four score and seven years ago …"), but neither of them had ever heard Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address. They read it all the way through to the end.... With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to