She could never be ordinary, he thought. The sheer fact of her, this lovely, gray-haired woman out of the forests of the Northwest yet seamlessly present, here, in a thrumming restaurant in the city’s buzziest neighborhood, was simply norm-defying: a thunderbolt out of the blue. But what stunned him most, he realized, was the fact that he was so entirely at peace about all of it. For as long as Jake could remember he’d been torturing himself about the books he was writing, and then the ones he wasn’t writing, and the people surging past him in line, and the deep and terrible fear that he wasn’t good enough—or good at all—at the only thing he’d ever wanted to be good at, not to mention the fact that all around him people his own age were meeting and pairing off and pledging their allegiance to one another and even creating entirely new baby people together, while he’d barely found a woman he liked enough to date since breaking up with the poet, Alice Logan. Now, all of that was done: suddenly, peacefully, done.
“First of all,” said Jake, “making your boss sound smarter than he is—that’s what most people’s jobs are. And Whidbey Island seems to me like a pretty nice place to spend the better part of a decade. And as far as not having a serious boyfriend, obviously, you were waiting for me.”
She hadn’t been looking at him through this. She’d been looking down into her own hands and the glass they held. Now, though, she looked up, and after a moment, she smiled. “Maybe I was,” she said. “Maybe I thought, when I read your novel,
“Breakfast table!” Jake grinned.
“And maybe when I got in touch with your publicist I wasn’t just thinking how we should be trying to get some real authors on the show. Maybe I was thinking,
“Well now. So it comes out.”
Even in the restaurant’s inadequate light he could see she was embarrassed.
“Look, it’s fine. I’m glad you did. I’m incredibly glad.”
Anna nodded, but she wasn’t looking him in the eye.
“And you’re positive this isn’t freaking you out at all. I acted unprofessionally because I had a crush on a famous author.”
He shrugged. “I once contrived to sit next to Peter Carey on the subway, because I had this fantasy that I could strike up a conversation with Australia’s greatest living novelist, and we’d start having weekly Sunday brunches together where we’d discuss the state of fiction, and then he’d give my novel-in-progress to his agent … you get the idea.”
“Well, did you?”
Jake took a sip of his wine. “Did I what?”
“Sit next to him.”
He nodded. “Yeah. But I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. And he got off like two stops later, anyway. No conversation, no brunch, no introduction to his agent. Just another fan on the subway. That could have been us, if you’d been as much of a wuss as I am. But you actually reached out for something you wanted. Just like you picked up that application, off the bench, and filled it out. I admire that.”
Anna said nothing. She seemed overwhelmed.
“Like your old professor said, nobody else gets to own your life, right?”
She laughed. “Nobody else gets to
“It sounds like that pabulum we used to serve up in the MFA program.
“And that’s not true?”
“That is absolutely not true. Anyway, if you’re living your life, more power to you. I can’t think of anyone you owe a thing to. Your adoptive mom is gone. Your sister and aunt took themselves out of the equation, for now at least. You deserve every bit of happiness that’s coming to you.”
She reached across the table and took his hand. “I completely agree,” she said.
