into anything, and I sure won’t be guided by another white male professor’s opinion. No offense, sir.”
Giles smiles at her, and I can see that even on Louise Randall in her present plight it has the usual effect.
“All the best, Louise. I don’t know whether I can say Merry Christmas, but—Merry Christmas!”
A week after I should have flown home, Giles takes me to the airport and kisses me goodbye at the gate. We both know it is reckless to be seen like this in public, but as far as I’m concerned, the public can go boil its head.
“Be good,” he murmurs into my ear, and I can only nod. “When will you be back?”
“On the twelfth.” I did not tell him that I’ll be flying in from Heathrow. I have not told him about London, neither the job nor the interview. I don’t know why not, maybe because we didn’t talk about the time after the holidays at all. Or maybe because I don’t know what I think myself. Giles will be flying to London the day after tomorrow to spend Christmas with friends and be back two days before me. We might bump into each other on Trafalgar Square, theoretically. It will be very strange to know that he’s in London when I am, but—no. I haven’t told him.
Chapter 38
I HAD EXPECTED GILES and his cabin by the lake would dissolve into a sweet but hazy dream the moment my plane touched down at LaGuardia, but the very opposite happens. It is as if I had spent a week in the best place in the world and had been cast out into a chaos of people, noise, stench and loneliness.
I brace myself for the maternal onslaught, but Gloria remains shtum on the subject. It is as if I never planned to arrive seven days earlier. She feeds me and fills me in on all the depressing family details, but she doesn’t ask a single question about the man for whom I risked a big family rumpus. I’m guessing I have Nathan to thank for that. He and Jessica have decided to file for a divorce.
“Mom hasn’t asked me a single question about…about Giles,” I inform Nat glumly.
“Couldn’t very well,” Nat tells the baseball glove he is he is trying to fix. “She didn’t even know his name. Giles, huh?”
“Yes. So she took it really badly?”
“Could say that. On top of my little train wreck. Of course she has decided he is a married Catholic or a convicted criminal, or you would have told her about him.”
“No, he’s not. He’s a divorced WASP.”
“Jesus, Anna!” he breathes and looks up. We stare at each other for a second and then double up in convulsions of laughter.
My relatives make up for my mother’s ostensible lack of interest in my love life. The first thing everyone asks me is whether I have met anyone “down there.” Some of them know about Nick Hornberger, and for once I am happy to make him the topic of conversation. At least they’ll know the worst of him before he ruins my career at Ardrossan.
It is my father who eventually takes the bull by the horns, while my mother has her back turned to us in the kitchen.
“So this is all a recent development, this man that you met?”
“Not all that recent, but—yes.”
“Don’t make her talk about him, Dad. She’s found herself a WASP.”
“Nat, you’re not helping!”
“Well, statistically speaking, given the demographics in your part of the country, that wasn’t unlikely,” my father tells the egg whisk he is trying to fix. “I will admit, however, that I’m a little surprised. You’re going out with a Republican? Most of these Came-Over-in-the-Mayflower families down there are Republican, aren’t they?”
“Well, he isn’t, and his family didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Come over in the Mayflower. They were parliamentarians in the Civil War.”
“Parliamentarians? What are you talking about?”
“Not this Civil War. The English one, in the seventeenth century. Giles is English.”
Nat gives me a delighted slap on the shoulder.
“An Englishman! Just what you always wanted!”
“C’mon guys, gimme a break. Start kvetching, or I’ll feel even more guilty about this than I already do.”
“Why should we complain?” Mom shrugs sarcastically. “Our daughter is only going to live on another continent, thousands of miles and an ocean away from her family, among strangers. That’s no reason to complain, is it?”
“No one said anything about another continent, Mom!”
“How much of this is because he’s English?”
“I don’t know. This could be about a dozen things! He’s smart and