case of bottled water as soon as possible. He stripped out of all his clothes but his boxer briefs and his T-shirt and stretched out on the living room couch with Kate’s long, handwritten letter. Annoyance flared up inside of him that she had taken time to write out a comprehensive guide to the neighborhood pubs and restaurants. He was only annoyed, though, because he hadn’t done something similar. Well, he could write her an e-mail and suggest some places. And he’d left her that bottle of champagne in the fridge—that would count for something. Besides, wait till she saw his place. She’d be impressed, he was sure of that.
Kate would be on the plane now, pocketed somewhere above the Atlantic. He tried to picture her, but had trouble. He’d only seen a couple of photographs of her before, both from a few years ago. One was a photo that his father had taken during a trip to England a year before he died. He’d gone over for a large family wedding. Corbin remembered that he’d tried to talk both Corbin and his brother, Philip, into coming. Philip never would have come because it would have disappointed their mother, and Philip would never do anything to disappoint her. Corbin hadn’t gone because of work. When Richard Dell returned, he’d printed the digital pictures he’d taken and cut them into the size of regular photographs to fit them into an album. Richard showed Corbin the book, pointing out myriad English relatives. That was when Corbin had first seen Kate, bracketed on either side by her father and her mother, Richard’s cousin. “My favorite cousin,” he told Corbin. “We were more like brother and sister, really, and this girl, this Kate, is the spitting image, the, the . . .”
He trailed off. Richard had retired a few years after the divorce, and since retiring, he’d aged noticeably. Not just physically, although there was that, but mentally. He seemed frail, and even sometimes weepy.
“Maybe I should never have left,” Richard said, after they’d looked at every picture.
“Well, then—”
“Well, then, yes, I’d never have had you lovely boys, but your mother . . .”
Corbin didn’t need to hear about her. He’d heard plenty already.
The only other picture Corbin had seen of Kate was one that was attached to her e-mail account, a small square color photograph in which Kate’s face was three-quarters obscured by a book she was reading. Only her eyes peered at the camera.
There must be pictures here, Corbin thought, and almost got off the couch. There’s time, he told himself. I’m here for six whole months, he thought, and the thought scared him a little. He yawned several times, his jaw popping. A spatter of rain hit the pane of glass above him. He fell asleep.
He woke, as he always did, suddenly—his eyes opening on their own, his mind fully conscious, any dreams he might have had already expunged and gone, like blackened matches. He sat up. The headache was gone, but in its place was a ravenous hunger. He checked his phone. It was midafternoon.
He went to the kitchen, found an apple, and devoured it till it was nothing more than a pencil-thin core. He opened drawers looking for something else to eat, but there was very little. Everything in the kitchen was small, including a refrigerator not much bigger than a dorm fridge, a tiny porcelain-topped table pushed into a nook, and what looked like a dishwasher but turned out to be, in fact, a laundry machine. Corbin looked, but couldn’t find a dryer. It was something he could ask Kate about in an e-mail. He should check his account, anyway, especially since he hadn’t heard yet from the office he was supposed to be reporting to on Monday. He went back to the living room and found the part in Kate’s welcome letter where she gave him instructions on how to get onto wireless. He opened his laptop and checked messages, his mind rapidly seeking out Audrey Marshall’s name even though he knew that a message from her wasn’t a possibility. His brother had written to ask him when he was heading to London, because his mother wanted to know.
Corbin checked the Red Sox box scores from the night before, then jotted off a message to Kate, thanking her for the lengthy letter and mentioning the dryer. Then he shut the laptop down, got dressed again, and went out to find some food.