fifties, losing his mother to cancer in the course of five days. It’s told from a many-years-hence perspective, when the boy is grown and has sons of his own. The sentences are pristine and careful. The arc of the story is clear and controlled, with a swell of emotion at the end that he’s withheld and we’ve been waiting for. There’s a sadness that surprises me, not in the plot, which of course is about loss, but a sadness within the prose separate from content that I find in all his work—in his first novel, which was billed as comic, and in all the short stories. It’s a sense of despair about writing itself, a sort of throwing up of hands, as if to say I’ll put this down on the page but it’s not what I really mean because what I really mean cannot be put into words. It creates a sort of drag on the narrative. I looked up some reviews on microfiche to see if anyone else has commented on it. They have not. The early reviews I read were all positive, young writer with great promise and a bold future sort of thing. And for Thunder Road they were glowing and grateful. At long last. Silent for nine years. The novel we’ve been waiting for.
‘I read Thunder Road.’
‘Really?’ He flips the sandwiches and puts down the spatula. ‘Heavens.’ He touches his wrist. ‘My pulse is starting to race.’
I’m not sure if he’s serious. Does he care what I think, or is he just pretending?
‘I loved it.’
‘Honestly?’ He does seem in earnest.
‘Yes, yes.’ I tell him all the scenes I admired and why, the small moments and gestures. He seems eager for this approval, and I exaggerate my initial responses. I don’t mention I read the earlier books as well, because I’m not sure I can keep up this level of enthusiasm that long.
He calls the boys and they come to the stove with plates and when he slides a sandwich onto John’s plate he says, ‘She liked my book.’ And when he slides one onto Jasper’s plate he says, ‘She liked my book.’ And when John asks if we can play cards at the table, he says, ‘Why not,’ and we eat and play and afterward at the sink when the boys are zooming their plastic planes around the woodstove, he pulls me close and tells me he loves me. I kiss him and our lips are slippery from the grilled cheese and the boys’ planes have stopped flying.
I tell Oscar about Adam selling the garage. We’re at the boys’ swim lesson in East Cambridge, watching them by the indoor pool on lawn chairs. The air is humid, rank with a chlorine and soggy human smell. My jeans are stuck to my legs.
‘Come live with us,’ he says.
The boys’ thin arms are thrashing toward the deep end. They’re learning the crawl. It’s hard to breath in the wet air. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘I know you weren’t. But why not?’
He doesn’t know how I live, how far I need to run, how much I owe, how little I sleep, or that I’ve now gotten rejection letters from three agents. I haven’t told him about the lump under my arm. He calls me his waif, his down-on-her-luck waitress, but he takes it all lightly. In fact, Holly Golightly is one of his names for me. If we lived together I would expose myself as the blighted Jean Rhys character I really am.
The next Saturday he and the boys pick me up to go apple picking. They know an orchard out in Sherborn where you get cider doughnuts afterward. I’m excited about it all week. We never did those kinds of things in my family. There were never outings. Oscar and his boys love an outing.
I prepared them for the size of my place, but they are still surprised when they come in.
‘It’s like Thumbelina’s house,’ Jasper says.
‘It’s smaller, and Casey is a regular-size girl,’ John says.
They jump on the futon, which is disappointingly unbouncy, examine my nibs and ink bottles on the window sill, and stick their heads in and out of the bathroom.
I think Oscar for once has no words at all.
‘The apples await,’ he says finally.
We head out to the car.
‘Back on your thrones,’ Oscar says and the boys strap themselves into their big car seats in back.
‘We think you should come live with us,’ John says.
‘Our beds are better.’ Jasper says, kicking the back of my seat.
‘Wow,’