“Hey, really nice of you to look over my stuff!” Purcell said. He was greatly excited. “I’m still in shock. I’ve been talking to my wife about it. I don’t think she believed me when I said you’d agreed to do that for me.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble. I miss teaching.” This, too, was a lie.
The Birdseye was a classic specimen of a diner, with aqua-and-black-checkered tiles and a shining stainless bar and stools. Jake ordered a burger and a chocolate shake. Purcell wanted the chicken soup.
“You know, I was surprised you wanted to meet in Rutland, though. Nobody comes to Rutland. Everybody comes through Rutland.”
“Except the people who live here, I guess.”
“Yeah. Whoever the genius town planner was, who decided one of the state’s busiest routes ought to run down the main street, he should’ve been tarred and feathered.” Purcell shrugged. “Maybe it seemed like a good idea at the time, I don’t know.”
“Well, you’re a history teacher, aren’t you? You probably see things from more of a backward-looking perspective.”
The guy frowned. “Did I tell you I was a history teacher? Most people, because they know I write stories, assume I teach English. But I’ll tell you a dark secret. I don’t love reading fiction. Other people’s fiction.”
“No? You prefer to read history?”
“I prefer to read history and write fiction.”
“You must have found that challenging at Ripley. Reading your classmates’ work.”
Their waitress brought Jake’s milkshake in a full glass and a half-full steel tumbler. It tasted amazing and sank straight to the pit of his stomach.
“Oh, not really. I think when you go into a situation like that you adapt. If I’m going to be asking people in my workshop to give my work a generous and close reading, I need to do the same for them.”
Jake decided this moment was as good as any. “Sadly, my own student didn’t feel that way. My late student.”
Purcell, to Jake’s dismay, sighed at this. “I wondered how long it would take us to get around to Evan Parker.”
Jake retreated instantly, but not very persuasively.
“Well, I remember you mentioned he was from this area. Rutland, right?”
“That’s right,” said Purcell.
“I guess he’s been on my mind today. He had some kind of a business here, I think? A bar of some kind?”
“Tavern,” said Purcell.
The waitress returned and set down their plates with a flourish. His burger looked mammoth, with fries piled up so high they spilled onto the table when the plate landed. Purcell’s soup, despite the fact that it was billed as an appetizer, was also in a meal-sized bowl.
“They certainly know how to eat up here,” Jake observed when she’d gone.
“Have to survive the winters,” said Purcell, taking up his spoon.
For a moment, conversation took a back seat.
“It’s nice that you two kept up with each other. After Ripley, I mean. It’s pretty isolated.”
“Well, Vermont isn’t exactly the Yukon,” Purcell said, with a definite edge to his tone.
“No, I mean … for us as writers. We’re so alone in what we do. When you get a taste of that fellowship, it’s something you want to hold on to.”
Purcell nodded eagerly. “That was just what I was hoping to find at Ripley. Maybe even more than the teachers, just that connection to other people doing what I wanted to do. So yeah, I absolutely kept up with a few of the others, Evan included. Him and I sent each other stuff for a couple of months, until his passing.”
Inwardly, Jake winced at this, though whether it was due to the thought of that “stuff” passing back and forth between the two writers or to the “him and I” wasn’t immediately clear.
“We all need a reader. Every writer does.”
“Oh, I know. It’s why I’m so appreciative—”
But Jake didn’t want to go there. At least, not before he absolutely had to.
“So you sent him the same stories you sent me? And he sent you his work, too? I always wondered what happened to that novel he was working on.”
It was a risk, of course. He’d been pretty sure that if Purcell had actually read Evan Parker’s work in progress he’d have mentioned its commonality with
“Well, I sent him mine, for sure. He had a couple of my stories when he passed, that he was going to send back edits on, but he kept his own stuff pretty close to the chest. I only ever saw a couple of pages. A woman who lived in an old house with her daughter and worked on a psychic hotline? That’s what I remember. You probably saw way more of that novel than I did.”
Jake nodded. “Very reticent in the workshop itself, when it came to his project. Those same pages you mentioned, that was all he ever turned in. It’s certainly all I ever saw,” he said pointedly.
Purcell was digging into the bottom of his bowl for the chicken.
“D’you think he had other friends in the program he might have been talking to?”
The teacher looked up. He held Jake’s gaze for a bit too long. “Do you mean, was he showing his work to anyone else?”
