The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [86]
Privately, and discussed with her only true friend, her Saint Bernard, Henry, Joanna had begun watching crotches. Male crotches of the bike racers.
Joanna had grown up the only child of pious and simple parents in a small west Texas town. Her mother had been a librarian and almost forty-two when Joanna was born. Her father, a letter carrier, had been fifty. Both had assumed, the way only such parents can assume, that their only child would grow up to be like them— hardworking, grateful for what they had, average. And for a time Joanna had done just that, as a Girl Scout and member of the church choir, as an ordinary student getting by in school, and, following the lead of her best friend, applying to nursing school after twelfth-grade graduation. Yet plain and dutiful as she seemed and even viewed herself, inside Joanna was rebellious, even quirky.
She’d had her first sex when she was eighteen with the assistant pastor of the church. Horrified afterward, and certain she was pregnant, she fled to Colorado, telling everyone, friends, parents and assistant pastor included, that she’d been accepted to a nursing school affiliated with the University of Denver. Both were inaccurate—she had not been accepted to nursing school, nor was she pregnant. Still she’d stayed in Colorado, worked hard and become a licensed physical therapist. When her father became ill she moved back to Texas to help her mother care for him. And when both parents died, literally within weeks of each other, she’d immediately packed everything and gone to New Mexico.
On Saturday, October 1, one week before the homecoming dinner for Elton Lybarger, Joanna had turned thirty-two. She had not made love, nor been made love to since that night with the west Texas assistant pastor.
A sudden round of applause followed two waiters across the room as they brought in a large cake over-flowing with candles and set it in front of Elton Lybarger. As they did, Pascal Von Holden put his hand on Joanna’s arm.
“Can you stay?” he asked.
Turning from the festivities at Lybarger’s table, she looked at him. “What do you mean?”
Von Holden smiled, and the creases in his sunburned face turned white.
“I mean can you stay here, in Switzerland, to continue your work with Mr. Lybarger?”
Joanna ran a nervous hand through her freshly washed hair.
“Me, stay here?”
Von Holden nodded.
“For how long?”
“A week, perhaps two. Until Mr. Lybarger is physically comfortable at his home.”
Joanna was completely taken aback. All evening she’d been looking at her watch, wondering when she would get back to her room to pack all the gifts and trinkets for her friends, which Von Holden had helped her purchase in their tour of Zurich that afternoon. When she would get to bed. What time she would have to get up to get to the airport for her flight home the following day.
“My d-dog,” she stammered. The idea of staying in Switzerland had never occurred to her. The concept of spending any time outside her own self-made nest was all but overwhelming.
Von Holden smiled. “Your dog will be cared for while you are away, of course. And while you are here, you will have your own apartment on the grounds of Mr. Lybarger’s estate.”
Joanna didn’t know what to think, how to respond or even react. There was a round of applause from Lybarger‘s table as he blew out the candles and again, seemingly from nowhere, the oompah band appeared and played “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
Coffee and after-dinner drinks were served along with squares of Swiss chocolate. The plump lady helped Lybarger cut his cake, and waiters brought pieces of it to each table.
Joanna drank the coffee and took a sip from