Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [55]
For a lot of reasons, Claire was nervous. There’d be people in the audience who appeared, in one guise or another, in her book; they might have reason to be hostile. Since leaving home for college, Claire had returned as infrequently as possible. When her parents’ marriage dissolved and her father, at the age of fifty-five, married a local woman two years older than Claire and had another child, Claire had been aghast and her mother devastated. Claire had had little contact with her father in the past decade; they exchanged Christmas cards, and on the few occasions Claire had visited her mother in Bluestone she had dutifully spent several awkward afternoons with him and his new wife, Mandy, and their daughter Brianna, Claire’s half-sister.
Claire felt fairly certain that her father wouldn’t come that evening, and as she scanned the crowd she was sure she’d been right. Only after the reading was over—three carefully chosen, self-deprecating passages that touched on nothing more serious than the death of a pet guinea pig and her capricious destruction of her mother’s prize flower bed (an incident she depicted with far more frivolity than it had occasioned at the time)—did Claire look up and see her father standing alone at the back, a tall man with distinguished gray hair, his impassive expression a bracing shock above the indulgent smiles of the audience she had charmed, clapping politely in their seats.
When the inevitable question arose about her parents’ response to the book, Claire gestured toward Lucinda, sitting with Martha Belle, and then to her father—but he was gone. Even as the question was being asked, he had slipped out.
AS THE QUESTION-AND-ANSWER period was winding down, a balding, paunchy, vaguely familiar man in a red windbreaker stood up.
“Hey, Claire, don’t know if you remember me. I was in the class behind you at Bluestone High. Terry Shaw. How’re you doing.” He held his hand shyly in a half-wave, hitched up his pants, and cleared his throat. “Just wondering what ‘Jill’ thinks about all this.”
Claire had known that she might get a question like this, but somehow it caught her off guard. She took a breath. “Well,” she said, “this book is a novel, which means, as you know, that the characters are made up. Some are composites, so you might recognize bits of people here and there. But Jill isn’t based on any one specific person.” Cool it, she thought; you’re lecturing—and worse, you sound defensive. Anyway, Terry didn’t look convinced. Claire saw him raise his eyebrows at someone a few rows over. She smiled weakly. “Next question?”
Terry raised a half-curled index finger. “She sure seems a lot like Alison Gray.”
Claire felt her chest constrict. It was hard to breathe. “Really?” she squeaked. “Huh, that’s interesting. Maybe a little, I guess.”
Alison. Claire didn’t know what she thought of her book. She didn’t even know if she’d read it. And now it didn’t matter, did it? Real life had taken precedence, relegating Claire’s small book to an appropriately minor place in Alison’s mind. If she thought of it at all.
Chapter Four
May 1998
When Alison opened the door at 32 Barton Road to find Charlie standing there, the first thing she noticed was his blond wavy hair. The second was that he looked unabashedly American, tan and robust, with a white T-shirt under his frayed oxford, sleeves rolled to the elbows. His shoulders were broad, though he was quite thin, and his face was a little soft, as if he hadn’t outgrown the last traces of baby fat. His eyebrows were blond caterpillars over light blue eyes.
At dinner that night she watched him. He and Ben were a study in contrasts: Ben lanky and angular and slightly awkward, with his glasses and dark hair and air of suppressed whimsy, Charlie as loose-limbed and sandy haired as a golden retriever. Right away she was suspicious: easy charm like his tended to come wrapped around a roguish core. This M.O. was prevalent in southerners of a certain type—affluent, entitled, fraternity bred—and it wasn’t a type she usually went for. But as they