Bird in Hand - Christina Baker Kline [67]
If not, why not?
As Noah clung to Alison, sobbing, she made her way down the steep metal stairs to the bottom of the slide, falling into her mother’s ineffectual if vaguely comforting embrace. They walked most of the way home in silence, Noah still holding on tight. As they got close to the house, Alison’s mother turned to her and said, “I don’t blame you. For what happened.”
Alison’s stomach tightened. She nodded.
“But I wonder … ,” her mother said.
“Mother—”
“Alison, let me finish. Your going alone to the party—and drinking too much—”
“Please,” Alison pleaded. “Please stop. Noah is right here.”
“Oh, he doesn’t know what we’re talking about. Do you, Noah?” her mother said, bending to look in his face.
“Mommy drinking too much.”
“Too much what?”
“Too much juice.”
“See?” Alison’s mother said.
“Too much juice make a tummy ache.”
“Yes, it does. Your mommy had a big tummy ache.”
“Yeah. She was sad.”
“Yes, she was. She still is a little sad.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why you need to be especially nice to your mommy right now.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Alison snapped.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “For God’s sake.”
Alison’s mother smiled at her, wanting to share the joke, but Alison looked away.
“Anyway, I don’t know what’s going on with Charlie,” her mother said, “but something is going on with Charlie, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Alison said. She held Noah tight, tighter than he wanted; he squirmed and wriggled down. “I think he’s going to leave me.” As soon as she said the words, she knew they were true.
“Oh, Alison,” her mother said. She put her arm around her shoulders and Alison started to cry. Her mother pulled her close, the way she had sometimes when Alison was a child, and Alison felt both the desire to resist and the desire to submit, to be held, to let go.
“Why Mommy crying?” Noah asked, looking up at the two of them, his arms around their knees. When he got no answer he mumbled, “Juice make a tummy ache,” and nodded his head. Juice make a tummy ache; a tummy ache make Mommy sad. It wasn’t so hard to understand if you really thought about it.
part four
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
—T. S. ELIOT,
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Chapter One
Sitting at a table in a Barnes & Noble in Atlanta at eight-thirty Monday evening, after her reading, making small talk with the staff and signing books for a few stragglers, Claire felt a rising impatience. Earlier, between appointments, she had called Charlie’s cell phone to give him the name of the hotel. His flight had been scheduled to land at 7:49 P.M., too late to make the reading, so he was taking a cab to the hotel, and would meet her in the bar. Now he’s in the cab, now he’s arriving at the hotel, now he’s ordering a drink. … She imagined running her hand down the front of his pants, feeling him stiffen in anticipation as he unzipped her jeans and slid his finger inside her. …
“Can you just write ‘To my good friend Ursula’—that’s U-R-S-U-L-A— and, oh, I don’t know, ‘Good luck with your own novel,” said the woman standing in front of Claire, holding out a copy of Blue Martinis.
Claire blinked. She took the book and opened it to the title page.
“It’s five hundred pages, Times New Roman double spaced. I was wondering if you can recommend an agent? I’m gonna need one soon. Everybody who’s read it says my book has ‘best seller’ written all over it, so I need someone who really knows the biz. By the way, can I have your e-mail address? I can send it to you as an attachment, and maybe you could look it over, tell me what you think.”
No, no, and no, Claire was thinking as she dutifully transcribed onto the title page exactly what the woman had dictated. “Uh—there are a lot of great resources for writers on the Internet,” she said, skirting Ursula’s requests as she closed the book and handed it back. “Try literarymarketplace.com, for starters. You could also check the acknowledgments