all the men in the neighborhood seemed to lust after. Or his skinny, nervous, suit-and-tie-wearing friend who couldn’t handle his liquor. Or his friend’s crazy artist wife. Or his twenty-eight-year-old agent, for Christ’s sake—that was her job.
For the first time Roy noticed that his wife looked particularly harried and even a bit drunk.
“Was the traffic awful? I thought it might be on a Friday. I can unload the U-Haul and return it to the garage if you’d like to have a bath,” he said gently.
Wendy stared at him. What was the point?
The front door clicked and Shy flounced into the house. She ran the kitchen tap and drank straight from the stream.
“I won at table tennis.” She slurped some more water. “I’m starving. What are we having for dinner?”
“I went to watch for a bit. She’s quite good,” Roy shouted from the other room.
“Mr. Streko has been a bit of an arse lately, but at least he let me play. I thought maybe his cat was sick, but then he posted a picture of his cat looking totally fine. I asked Dad to leave because we were having a team meeting after,” Shy explained breathlessly. “I still can’t believe I won. The other girl was pretty crap. But maybe it’s my talent. Maybe I’ll go to the Olympics.”
“The team could do with a proper coach,” Roy put in from the library. He didn’t like that Streko, not one bit.
“I almost died,” Wendy said for the hundredth time.
Shy snatched up her mother’s wineglass and took a sip. “I’m going to take a shower,” she announced and dashed upstairs.
“I’ll unload the wood,” Roy said, and began collecting his keys, jacket, and shoes.
Wendy retrieved the bottle of wine from the fridge and took it upstairs with her. They didn’t care whether she worked at Fleurt or Enjoy! or the National Enquirer, or that she’d just survived a terrifying encounter with a serial killer. In fact, the problem with having a family at all was that nobody noticed if you were dead or alive until dinner went unmade and they found your torso floating in the dirty water behind Ikea.
PART V NOVEMBER 5
Chapter 23
“Come in, come in!”
Roy Clarke led the group of newly arrived neighbors into the house, through the kitchen, and into the library.
“I should say, ‘Come out.’ The party is outside in the garden, just through the French doors. It’s a bit chilly, but the fire will take care of that. It’s going to be enormous.”
“Thanks so much for doing this. What a treat.” A chubby man wearing thick glasses, a plaid wool shirt, and hiking boots held out his hand for Roy to shake. “Your wife stopped by the store yesterday. She said you’ve written a draft of a new book. I’m excited.”
Roy could not remember ever having met this man.
“Yes, yes. Good to see you. I gave the draft to Wendy to read.” Roy shook the man’s hand, trying to place him. He seemed like the type to own a store that sold complicated backpacks, freeze-dried camping meals, and mosquito netting.
The man laughed and patted his puffy pink cheeks. “It’s Jefferson. From Smith Corner Books? I shaved, I shaved. No beard, no beard!”
Aha. Jefferson, owner of the not-so-new-anymore bookstore where Roy had made his Brooklyn debut over a year ago. Roy had only been inside the bookshop maybe once or twice since moving in. Wendy went all the time—just to browse, she said, although he suspected she was really making sure they kept the Roy Clarke Rainbow in stock.
“Full disclosure: Wendy forwarded the manuscript to me. I read it yesterday in one sitting. ‘Blast Off, Roy Clarke!’—that’s the headline of the prepublication review I’m going to submit to Publishers Weekly. You really outdid yourself this time.”
Roy was horrified. Wendy had sent the bookstore man his possibly terrible new book?
“Shabba Ranks for your help, Claire,” he mumbled nervously in Cockney rhyming slang.
But Jefferson had already barged past him and into the library. He threw his arms wide and spun around in a circle. “I’m in the home of one of my favorite living authors!” he shouted exultantly before dancing out the French doors.
Roy hung back as more guests followed Jefferson outside. They knew who Roy was, even if he wasn’t quite sure he knew them, but they were either too intimidated or too rude to stop and introduce themselves.
He could not mistake the hairy, tattooed creature skulking past him and making a beeline for the food tables in the garden: Streko.