He noticed, as his own writer friends began to meet her for a second or third time, that they greeted her with warmth, sometimes reaching for her with a kiss or a hug even before they turned to him. Anna remembered their names, their partners’ names, their pets’ names (and species), their jobs and their complaints about their jobs, and she asked about everything, even as Jake looked on, smiling tightly, wondering how she’d managed to find out so much about them in so short a time.
Because she’d asked, it only belatedly occurred to him.
With his mother and father they established a monthly brunch in the city, following an Adam Platt review to a dim sum restaurant nestled beneath the Manhattan Bridge which then became their regular destination. He was seeing more of his parents now, with Anna, than he had when he’d been single and theoretically unencumbered by another person’s schedule and commitments. As the winter months passed, he watched her forge a deep familiarity with the two of them, his mother’s work at the high school, his father’s travails with a partner in his firm, the sad saga of the neighbors two houses down on the other side of the street, whose teenage twins were both in freefall and taking the rest of the family down with them. Anna wanted to go yard sale shopping with Jake’s mother (an activity he himself had taken pains to avoid since he was a child) when the weather got warmer, and she shared his father’s long-held penchant for Emmylou Harris (before his very eyes the two of them looked up Harris’s tour schedule and made plans to see her that summer at the Nassau Coliseum). In Anna’s presence his parents talked more about themselves, their health, and even their feelings about Jake’s success, than they ever had when he’d been alone with them, which unsettled him even as he understood that this was good, a good thing for them all. He had always accepted the bald fact that they loved him, but it was more of a default position than an expression of organic preference. He was their child,
One Sunday at the end of January, after their regular dim sum feast, his father pulled him aside on Mott Street and asked what his intentions were.
“Isn’t it the girl’s father who’s supposed to ask that?”
“Well, maybe I’m asking on behalf of Anna’s father.”
“Oh. That’s funny. Well, what should they be?”
His father shook his head. “Are you serious? This girl is fantastic. She’s beautiful and kind and she’s crazy about you. If I was her dad I’d give you a kick in the pants.”
“You mean, grab her before she changes her mind.”
“Well, no,” his father said. “More like, what are you waiting for? Why would she change her mind?”
Jake couldn’t say why, not out loud, obviously not to his father, but he was thinking about it every single day as @TalentedTom continued to hurl contempt into the void. Jake spent each morning toggling through his Google alerts and torturing himself with new word combinations to cast over the internet: “Evan+Parker+writer,” “Evan+Parker+Bonner,” “
Who thinks it’s okay for @JacobFinchBonner to steal another writer’s book?
Why is @MacmillanBooks still selling #Crib, a novel its author lifted from another writer?
Because of this. Obviously.
