“Well.” Anna shrugged. “Right time, I don’t know. A few years earlier would have been even better. But I certainly was able to appreciate what I had, while I had it. And I was extremely fond of her. I was a junior at the university when she got ill. I went home to take care of her. That’s when my hair turned gray.”
Jake looked at her. “Really? I’ve heard of that. Overnight, right?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. The way people talk about it, it sounds like you wake up in the morning and BAM—every strand’s been replaced. For me it just started to grow out and everything new was this color. That was kind of a shock of its own, but after a while I decided it was kind of an opportunity. I could go any direction I wanted with it. I did color it for the first couple of years, but eventually I decided I liked it like this. I liked that it was a little bit confusing. Not for myself, but for other people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh … just that the combination of hair that signifies ‘old’ with a face that isn’t old is confusing to a lot of people. I’ve noticed it can make some people think I’m older than my real age, and others think I’m younger.”
“How old are you?” Jake asked. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask.”
“No, it’s okay. I’ll tell you, but only after you tell me how old you think I am. It’s not a vanity thing. I’m just curious.”
She smiled at Jake, and he took the opportunity to see it all again: the pale oval face, the streaked silver hair down her back, and that girlish hairband with the linen shirt and leggings he’d seen around town, and on her feet tan boots that looked ready to hike off home along a rugged wooded path. She was right, he realized, about her age. Not that he’d never been especially adept at assessing age, but with Anna he couldn’t have said any number between, say, twenty-eight and forty, with any certainty at all. Because he had to say a number, he approximated his own.
“Are you … in your mid-thirties?”
“I am.” She smiled. “Want to try for the bonus round?”
“Well, I’m thirty-seven, myself.”
“Nice. A nice age.”
“And you are … ?”
“Thirty-five. An even nicer age.”
“It is,” Jake said. Outside it had started to rain. “So. Why radio?”
“Oh I know, it’s ridiculous. Radio broadcasting is an insane industry to want to go into in the twenty-first century, but I like my job. Well, not this morning, but most of the time. And I’m going to keep trying to get fiction on the air. Though I doubt many other novelists are going to be as mild-mannered about it as you were.”
Inwardly, Jake winced. “Mild-mannered” had made him think, immediately, of that other version of himself, the Jake who’d once silently endured the diatribe of a narcissistic guest-writer from California:
On the other hand, that same diatribe had ultimately brought him here. And here was good. Despite the incandescent events of the past several months—Oprah! Spielberg!—and the ongoing astonishment of his book’s ever-growing readership, he was actually happier right at this moment—with the silver-haired girl in the wood-lined coffee shop—than he’d been in months.
“Most of us,” said Jake, “most fiction writers, I mean, we’re not all that hung up about the sales and the rankings and the Amazon number. I mean, we care, we need to eat like everyone else, but we’re just so glad people are reading our work. Like,
“Tree falls in the forest,” Anna said.
“A suitable northwest interpretation. But if they do read it, you never get over the thrill of that: a person you don’t even know, paying their hard-earned money so they can read what you wrote? It’s amazing. It’s unbelievable. When I meet people at these events and they bring in some grubby copy they’ve dropped in the bath or spilled coffee on, or folded down the corners of the pages, that’s the best feeling. Even better than someone buying a brand-new copy right in front of me.” He paused. “You know, I have an idea you’re a secret writer, yourself.”
“Oh?” She looked at him. “Why secret?”
“Well, you haven’t mentioned it yet.”
“Maybe it hasn’t come up yet.”
“Okay. So what is it? Fiction? A memoir? Poetry?”
