Grist Mill Road_A Novel by Christopher J. Yates

Author:Christopher J. Yates [Yates, Christopher J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1250189926
Amazon: B01N5EV572
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

INTO THE BLUE

An early summer burst onto New York City like a wave, the skies so clear they shone with a kind of reckless abandon, the city framed golden and blue.

After seeing you at Grand Central and finding your byline in the newspaper, I waited a week before trying to contact you, not wanting to seem like some kind of stalker, even though I’d quickly worked out how easy it would be to get in touch, what with every one of the email addresses at your workplace being of the same format—[email protected].

I don’t even remember what I wrote to you that first time. Something bland.

… so good to run into you … and then my family whisked me off to Maine and we never got to talk … would really like to sit down and catch up … coffee, perhaps?

I didn’t think there was a chance in hell you’d get back to me. Why would you speak to someone who stood there and watched while his best friend shot out your eye? And yet, two days later, you replied.

… sorry for my reaction in Grand Central, Patrick, when I realized who you were … a lot of baggage … I did always wonder what happened to you after your family moved away … the other day I saw your father interviewed on the television about gun control … please understand that I don’t like to talk about that day, I just DON’T talk about that day … but if you would like to meet up …

I tried to calculate the precise amount of time I should wait before I sent a reply, one of life’s great imponderables. Three hours and I couldn’t wait any longer. I hammered out a long message about life in Maine, how I came to New York to major in economics at Columbia and never left, that I worked an incredibly boring job in the Data Acquisition department at Idos Investments, that I had a tiny apartment on St. Mark’s Place, in which I liked to home-cure my own bacon and smoke it on the roof, that I owned a blowtorch for completely nonmasculine reasons and was thinking of starting a food blog.

You replied that East Village fume-smoked bacon sounded delicious, that you were a crime reporter for the New York Mail and lived on bodega bagels and stale coffee, had an apartment in Chelsea and that your idea of a culinary treat was to buy the slightly more expensive tub of hummus. Your office was a place called The Shack (I had to look it up) and you said you’d love to grab a cup of stale coffee sometime.

I’d seen you for no more than a minute, we’d exchanged only two messages and yet somehow I already knew you would change my life, Hannah. Somehow I knew that with you beside me I would become a better version of myself and that therefore I would do anything to be with you.

It was all true. How did I know?

I suggested lunch at The Odeon, quietly proud of myself for thinking of it.

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