is one of her old punishing techniques for when she feels her daughter has stepped out of line. Holly next calls Pete, who asks again what she’s doing and when she’ll be back. Thinking of Dan Bell and his terribly gay grandson, she tells him she’s visiting friends in New England and will be in the office bright and early on Monday morning.
“You better be,” Pete says. “You have a depo on Tuesday. And the office Christmas party is on Wednesday. I plan to kiss you under the mistletoe.”
“Oough,” Holly says, but she’s smiling.
She arrives at the Monroeville Mall at quarter past eleven and makes herself sit in the car for another fifteen minutes, alternately punching her Fitbit (pulse running just over 100) and praying for strength and calm. Also to be convincing.
At eleven-thirty she enters the mall and takes a slow stroll past some of the shops—Jimmy Jazz, Clutch, Boobaloo strollers—looking in the windows not to scope out the merchandise but to catch a reflected glimpse of Chet Ondowsky, should he be watching her. And it will be Chet. His other self, the one she thinks of as George, is the most wanted man in America just now. Holly supposes he might have a third template, but she thinks it unlikely; he’s got a pig-self and a fox-self, why would he think he’d need more?
At ten minutes of twelve, she gets in line at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, then queues at Sbarro for a slice of pizza she doesn’t want. She unzips her jacket so the pink turtleneck shows, then finds an unoccupied table in the food court. Although it’s lunchtime, there are quite a few of those—more than she expected, and that makes her uneasy. The mall itself is low on foot traffic, especially for the Christmas shopping season. Seems to have fallen on hard times, everybody buys from Amazon these days.
Noon comes. A young man wearing cool sunglasses and a quilted jacket (a couple of ski-lift tags dangle jauntily from the zipper) slows, as if he means to chat her up, then moves on. Holly is relieved. She has little in the way of brush-off skills, never having had much reason to develop them.
At five past noon she starts to think Ondowsky isn’t coming. Then, at seven past, a man speaks from behind her, and in the warm, we’re-all-pals-here voice of a TV regular. “Hello, Holly.”
She jumps and almost spills her coffee. It’s the young man with the cool sunglasses. At first she thinks this is a third template after all, but when he takes them off she sees it’s Ondowsky, all right. His face is slightly more angular, the creases around his mouth are gone, and his eyes are closer together (not a good look for TV), but it’s him. And not young at all. She can’t see any lines and wrinkles on his face, but she senses them, and thinks there may be a lot. The masquerade is a good one, but up this close it’s like Botox or plastic surgery.
Because I know, she thinks. I know what he is.
“I thought it would be best if I looked just a bit different,” he says. “When I’m Chet, I tend to get recognized. TV journalists aren’t exactly Tom Cruise, but . . .” A modest shrug finishes the thought.
With his sunglasses off, she sees something else: his eyes have a shimmery quality, as if they’re underwater . . . or not there at all. And isn’t there something similar going on with his mouth? Holly thinks of how the picture looks when you’re at a 3-D movie and take off the glasses.
“You see it, don’t you?” The voice is still warm and friendly. It goes well with the small smile dimpling the corners of his mouth. “Most people don’t. It’s the transition. It will be gone in five minutes, ten at most. I had to come here directly from the station. You’ve caused me some problems, Holly.”
She realizes she can hear the small pause when he occasionally puts his tongue to the roof of his mouth to stop the lisp.
“That makes me think of an old country song by Travis Tritt.” She sounds calm enough but she can’t take her eyes from his, where the sclera shimmers into the iris and the iris shimmers into the pupil. For the time being, they’re countries with unstable borders. “It’s called ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ ”
He smiles, the lips seeming to spread too far, and