Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [51]
He looked at her for a long moment, trying to gauge whether to pursue it. What are you really saying? This was the kind of question you didn’t ask, or at least that Charlie didn’t ask. Midwestern circumspection had been bred in him too well. You accepted what people told you about themselves, even when you knew there was more to the story. You respected their desire to reveal only what they were comfortable with, comfort being the ruling principle.
“Okay,” he said.
They sat there for a few minutes, listening to the Bach concerto playing on the portable cassette player in the corner, the ticking of the wind-up clock in the kitchen, the muffled whoosh of cars going by in the rain. Claire seemed closed again, determinedly friendly and distant.
“I like her,” he said eventually. “She seems nice. Maybe a little naïve?”
“A little,” Claire said. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, you know. Haven’t you read Henry James?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Well, you should,” she said. “Alison is a classic Henry James heroine.”
Later, after the rain subsided, Charlie stepped out the back door onto the uneven concrete patio and looked up at the sky, white as skim milk. Trees, heavy with rain, shook their sodden leaves in the wind. He would have liked to see this break in the weather as an omen, but he was finished with omens for now.
Chapter Three
Standing at a podium in a small independent bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina, Claire looked out at the sparse collection of people scattered across the rows of folding chairs, and opened her book to a Post-it-marked page. “Thank you all for coming,” she said. “I’m just going to read a few short sections. Then we can talk.” She smiled nervously and began:
Emma’s college roommate was a girl named Colleen who met her boyfriend, Steve, on the first day of freshman orientation. On a rare evening when Steve wasn’t around, Emma asked Colleen how she knew so early that he was the one she wanted to spend the rest of her life with.
“What gave you that idea?” Colleen asked.
“Well, you spend every waking minute with him,” Emma said. “Not to mention sleeping. I just figured.”
“Look,” Colleen said. “I met Steve in the dining hall and we hit it off. We’re both pre-med, we run cross-country—we’ve got a lot in common. But what if I’d taken a year off before college? What if I’d gone to a different school? Well, I know what. I would’ve met a different Steve. You know—a nice, smart guy who’s ambitious enough but a little shy, who’s looking for a girlfriend to make him feel secure. There are probably hundreds of them out there—maybe thousands! It all comes down to timing and circumstance. If I had been born in a different town, or a different country—or, for that matter, a different decade—there’s no doubt in my mind I’d find the Steve I need.”
At the time Emma found Colleen’s philosophy shocking, and then, for a while, she was inclined to agree. But experience taught her something else. She came to believe that there was such a thing as true love, and that it was the most important thing in the world—more important than kindness or constancy, more important even than trust.
The reading went pretty well, given that two members of the Raleigh audience appeared to be mentally ill, three were distantly related to Martha Belle Clancy, two were bookstore employees, and one was the media escort. The four remaining people—“civilians,” as Suzy, the store clerk, called the audience members who attended out of genuine interest, not obligation or happenstance—had read a review or heard Claire earlier in the day on the radio, or, as one of them told her, stumbled across the novel on Amazon.com, where for a brief cyber-moment it had been a featured selection.
Back in her hotel room later that evening, Claire lay in bed, thinking about how strange it was that she had written those lines more than a year ago. She thought of Ben, of his dark hair slick after a shower, his crisp Thomas Pink shirts and beautiful hands, his attention to detail, his kindness. She