it to you?” Chris said, watching her practically run across the lobby.
“Maybe it’s still the fallout from yesterday,” I said. Or maybe she was still freaked out with me, for whatever reason, I thought. I was going to have to corner her, and ask her, ASAP.
He glanced over at me. “I’m surprised you’re okay with it. You aren’t usually this laid-back.”
I shrugged. “Hey, if Brian’s fine with me in contact sports, I owe him the same thing. Just gotta pray his reflexes get faster, that’s all.”
But he knew I was dodging his question. “Actually, I meant with Sue so on edge with you, but the thing with Brian too.”
“Where you off to?” I changed the subject and thumbed through the marked-up program. As always, I’d made many plans of where to be when, and then missed about half of what I wanted.
“I’ve got to get to the—hey, Kenny!” he greeted a guy I knew by sight, but not by site, if you will. “Emma, can you give me a minute—?”
I waved him off. “I’ll let you get going. See you later.”
Chris turned to speak animatedly with Kenny, and I moved off to consult my schedule. It was at that moment that I was targeted by the entirely too eager Mr. Widmark. Standing on point, his face lit up in recognition, and waving enthusiastically, he practically loped toward me. Abandoning all pretense to cordiality, I did an abrupt about-face and slipped into the darkened ballroom closest to me.
I closed the door gently, and relying on instinct until my eyes could adapt, I hugged the wall and followed it around until I found an empty seat on the aisle. Actually, there were a lot of empty seats, and I didn’t recognize anyone else around me. I slid down into my seat, hoping that even if Widmark had the lack of grace to follow me, he wouldn’t struggle too hard to find me in the dark. I ducked down and buried my face in the schedule.
This was a session on farmsteads, something I ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered with. Just too far off my radar and usually conflicted with the sessions I needed to see. Now I found myself prepared to be riveted by it.
When after a few minutes I wasn’t presented with that smiling face and villainous breath, I began to relax and take in a bit of the paper.
There was one thing, however, that gave me a quick jab in the memory, when the reader was talking about work done in northern New York State by an amateur, Josiah Miller, in the nineteenth century. A recently discovered copy of Miller’s work was shedding new light on the material in the area. I usually have a good brain for this sort of thing—references and the like—and kept thinking about it. I got nothing, so then I tried the trick of changing contexts. If you meet someone on the street whose face you remember knowing but whose name isn’t coming, you try envisioning them behind a counter or in running clothes, to see if you know them from the lunch place or from the gym or something like that. It usually works pretty well. With references, it’s a little different. You try and remember if it was a paper you read—and if so, was it in the library, online, or at home? What color was the cover, what was the font?—or was it something that someone was asking or telling you about? Etcetera.
It vexed me so much that I dropped the slender thread of concentration I had reserved for the paper and devoted it to chasing it down in my mind. I had it narrowed down to something I knew from the distant past of undergraduate rather than graduate school or my present work and eventually gave up, half thinking about the paper as it wandered on and on and on and on…
I felt my head nod again, but snapped it back up as soon as I realized I was falling asleep. For about thirty seconds, I was alert again, determined not to drift off, but then the conversation that was being whispered somewhere behind me was more than enough to keep me awake.
“—and typical of him, he never bothered showing. I mean, if he wasn’t going to bother, he should have called and let me know, right?”
“He wasn’t usually like that about private meetings, he was always happier with them. It’s the more public stuff he was shy of.”
They—two men—were talking about Garrison.