Lynn snorted. “This was on the freeway, I suppose? It was on its way to be an extra in a remake of
He had understood, then, the urge she so often felt when speaking to him—the urge to hang up on a person who had not even tried to understand one word you had said.
“How was your Thanksgiving?” Sigrid asked. Keller was sitting across from her at the travel agency, arranging to buy Don Kim’s stepdaughter a ticket to Germany so she could pay a final visit to her dying friend. The girl was dying of ALS. The details were too terrible to think about. Jennifer had known her for eleven of her seventeen years, and now the girl was dying. Don Kim barely made it from paycheck to paycheck. It had been necessary to tell Don that he had what he called “a considerable windfall from the eighties stock market” in order to persuade him that in offering to buy Jennifer a ticket, he was not making a gesture he could not afford. He had had to work hard to persuade him. He had to insist on it several times, and swear that in no way had he thought Don had been hinting (which was true). The only worry was how Jennifer would handle such a trip, but they had both agreed she was a very mature girl.
“Very nice,” Keller replied. In fact, that day he had eaten canned stew and listened to Albinoni (probably some depressed DJ who hadn’t wanted to work Thanksgiving night). He had made a fire in the fireplace and caught up on his reading of
“I was actually . . .” She dropped her eyes. “You know, my ex-husband has Brad for a week at Thanksgiving and I have him for Christmas. He’s such a big boy now, I don’t know why he doesn’t put his foot down, but he doesn’t. If I knew then what I know now, I’d never have let him go, no matter what rights the court gave that lunatic. You know what he did before Thanksgiving? I guess you must not have read the paper. They recruited Brad to liberate turkeys. They got arrested. His father thinks that’s fine: traumatizing Brad, letting him get hauled into custody. And the worst of it is, Brad’s scared to death, but he doesn’t dare
Keller had no idea what to say. Lately, things didn’t seem funny enough to play off of. Everything just seemed weird and sad. Sigrid’s ex-husband had taken their son to liberate turkeys. How could you extemporize about that?
“She could go Boston, London, Frankfurt on British Air,” Sigrid said, as if she hadn’t expected him to reply. “It would be somewhere around seven hundred and fifty.” She hit the keyboard again. “Seven eighty-nine plus taxes,” she said. “She’d be flying out at six p.m. Eastern Standard, she’d get there in the morning.” Her fingers stopped moving on the keyboard. She looked at him.
“Can I use your phone to make sure that’s a schedule that’s good for her?” he said. He knew that Sigrid wondered who Jennifer Kim was. He had spoken of her as “my friend, Jennifer Kim.”
“Of course,” she said. She pushed a button and handed him the phone. He had written the Kims’ telephone number on a little piece of paper and slipped it in his shirt pocket. He was aware that she was staring at him as he dialed. The phone rang three times, and then he got the answering machine. “Keller here,” he said. “We’ve got the itinerary, but I want to check it with Jennifer. I’m going to put my travel agent on,” he said. “She’ll give you the times, and maybe you can call her to confirm it. Okay?” He handed the phone to Sigrid. She took it, all business. “Sigrid Crane of Pleasure Travel, Ms. Kim,” she said. “I have a British Airways flight that departs Logan at six zero zero p.m., arrival into Frankfurt by way of London nine five five a.m. My direct line is—”
He looked at the poster of Bali framed on the wall. A view of water. Two people entwined in a hammock. Pink flowers in the foreground.
“Well,” she said, hanging up. “I’ll expect to hear from her. I assume I should let you know if anything changes?”
He cocked his head. “What doesn’t?” he said. “You’d be busy every second of the day if you did that.”
She looked at him, expressionless. “The ticket price,” she said. “Or shall I issue it regardless?”
“Regardless.” (Now, there was a word he didn’t use often!) “Thanks.” He stood.
“Say hello to my colleagues hiding under their desks on your way out,” she said.
In the doorway, he stopped. “What did they do with the turkeys?” he said.
“They took them by truck to a farm in Vermont where they thought they wouldn’t be killed,” she said. “You can read about it in yesterday’s paper. Everybody’s out on bail. Since it’s a first offense, my son might be able to avoid having a record. I’ve hired a lawyer.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
