reservation,” he said. “Point me to the restroom, and then, Nancy, we better scoot.”
As soon as he was down the hall, her mother leaned close to say, “He’s The One.” She was nodding as she said it, eyes bright.
Too much wine. “You’ve known him for a week,” Blue said.
“Almost three, actually. Doesn’t matter. When you know, you know.”
“I know you’re being brash.” She, Blue, had been brash a time or two, so she knew what it looked like, how it sounded. She had imagined, once, that she knew.
Her mother stood and stared down at her. “Harmony Blue, I did not get to fifty-nine years of age by being completely stupid.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Blue got up and began gathering the plates and glasses. “Just, think about it. The money—”
“Your money, is that what you mean? He’s not seeing me because my daughter’s rich and has generously padded my own accounts.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“He has his own money—and a little thing called integrity.” She held up her hand to stop Blue’s protest. “Yes, I know, some of the others were lacking. Irrelevant. I was sowing my oats.”
For four decades in all. A lot of oats in Nancy Kucharski’s bag. “Fine,” Blue said, going into the kitchen. “Still, these things take time to play out. You need to see how you feel about him after you’ve been together a year or two—”
“How old am I?” her mother demanded.
Blue set the dishes in the sink and turned. “Mom.”
“How old am I?”
“Fifty-nine,” Blue sighed.
“How many of my friends have died in the past ten years?”
“I don’t know … three?”
Her mother held up six fingers. “Cancer, cancer, stroke, drunk driver, cancer, heart disease. Now tell me I should suspend my judgment for a year or two.”
“You’re as healthy as I am.”
“Today.” She kissed Blue’s cheek and left her standing in the kitchen.
Calvin joined Blue while her mother took a turn in the bathroom. “I’m glad to get to meet you,” he said, and when he smiled there was no evident avarice, only the refreshing sense that, in his eyes, she was equally Blue Reynolds and Nancy’s daughter, or perhaps even more the latter. His pale gray-blue eyes made her think of huskies, those reliable sled dogs of the Inuit. She wanted to like him. So much as she knew him she did like him. He could sing. He owned a bookstore. He paid her mother more attention than he paid her. If her usual discreet inquiry into this man’s background proved out, well, that would be a start.
What a strange concept: her mother in love after all these years.
“All right then,” her mother called, heading for the foyer. “Have a good trip to the Keys. Watch out for pirates.”
“And sharks,” Calvin said, as he and Blue joined her.
“And I love you,” her mother added, kissing her forehead.
Blue watched the elevator doors close after them with tears welling—envy? longing? She wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to think about it. By the time she was back inside her apartment she had willed the tears away.
Outside Mitch Forrester’s Chapel Hill office window, the trees were a green haze of new leaves, the only real color on this gray, rainy morning. Spring weather had a solid hold on North Carolina, as was evident by the number of students who’d been showing up to class in shorts and flip-flops this last week before spring break. It was scheduled late this year, so they were more than ready. Today would be a mess of dripping plastic ponchos and wet umbrellas, slick floors and poorly attended classes.
An oak tree’s branches brushed his second-floor window. He’d been startled more than once by scratching sounds, nights he’d sat here on an old slip-covered couch reading journals or grading essays, nights when he’d thought all was calm outside. Shut away in the English department, he’d be unaware of the storm rolling in until the wind began rising, the trees swaying like so many lithe dancers in one of those troupes his ex-wife Angie had liked dragging him to see. Now he saw the rain stream off the tiny narrow leaves without paying it much attention, as what he was hearing on the telephone preoccupied him.
“Let me see if I understand correctly,” he said, returning to his desk. It was piled with scholarly books whose pages had long since yellowed, books with cracked spines and worn corners, and opinions, within their pages, that were hardly credited anymore. By contrast, Dr Seuss’s The Sleep Book was face-up with a note stuck to the front, reminding him to bring it for this afternoon’s tutoring session with a third-grader named Chris; after hearing Mitch’s story of how his son Julian had loved the book when he was a boy, Chris had grudgingly agreed to try reading it himself. A potted purple orchid with a name Mitch could never remember sat atop four copies of his most recent publication, a slim book that considered the role of women in Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. The legendary author hadn’t been too successful with women, a problem Mitch unfortunately shared.
He said, “I’ll need some sort of filming permit from the city along with whatever I arrange directly with you folks there at the Hemingway Home, yes?”
The man on the other end of the phone call, a volunteer with a gravelly voice, said yes, he believed so. However, he said, September was thick into hurricane season and if Mitch came then, he was taking his chances.
“I know—my parents live there in Key West. But I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately, I’m working against a number of factors, one of which is my, er, crew’s availability, and my own. I only have the fall semester to pull this project together. As I said, I’ll be down tomorrow and hope to start getting things in order. Can you give me the name of the person to contact about permits?” When he had the information jotted in his date book, he thanked the man and hung up.
Literary Lions, his under-construction biopic series about classic American authors, had seemed uncomplicated when he’d first come up with the concept, which he envisioned as ideal for public television. The money he might earn was likely to be modest—but as a tenured professor, he was doing fine. And as Julian had reminded him recently, he already had a lot more of everything—time, money, security, opportunity—than most of the world’s citizens. Mitch had admitted this was true, and said, “Now do we sing a chorus of ‘We Are The World’?” It was a nervous tic of a joke, he knew it even as the words left his mouth. Julian had been generous about it, though, saying, “Sure, Dad—you start.”
Mitch propped his feet on his desk and leaned back. His old leather chair squealed with the motion, testifying that, secure as a professor’s job was, there were no luxuries in the academe. If he could make Lions fly—the image made him chuckle—he would reward himself with a new chair.
That “if ” was a big one, however, and “uncomplicated” was proving to be a bit enthusiastic. To begin with, writing the script for the first episode, the “pilot,” as it was called, had been more challenging than he’d anticipated. He’d imagined it as something like prepping a lecture for twenty students. However, a few torturous nights of script writing had proven that a low-stakes lecture was nothing like crafting an entertaining and informative hour-long program for a million viewers, all armed with remote controls. Okay, maybe a million was a little zealous, to start. Thousands, though—surely he could count on thousands.
The script was coming along.
Overcoming his anxiety about inviting Julian to direct and film the pilot had