Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton

Author:Jane Hamilton [HAMILTON, JANE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780446551243
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

The third meeting of Mrs. Voden and Charlie a few days later, as told to Laura by her husband, went on longer than he’d figured. They had coffee at the one café in Hartley, called the Queen Bee. “I talked too much,” Charlie reported to his wife.

“What did you tell her?”

“About Mom and Dad-o. About—”

“Drinking out of the bottle until you were seven?”

“The whole story.”

Women, Laura considered, would like that detail, the idea of little Charlie having breastlike comfort, and the idea that Charlie’s mother had been relaxed and loving enough to ignore the child-rearing experts. “Did you tell her about barely graduating from high school?”

“Like I said, I told her everything.”

Had that been smart? If Jenna liked Charlie enough, she would appreciate how intuitive he was even though people in Hartley thought he was at heart a loser and a fruitcake. But if Jenna was just passing the time with Charlie, for her own bizarre reasons, if she was having a conversational fling, she would probably think that Charlie was, in fact, a loser. Still, Jenna had experience with all kinds of people, and Laura’s guess was that she would be impressed by Charlie’s ability to make something of himself even if his high-school teachers hadn’t been able to get him to read the assigned books or do his written homework.

Since the morning when Charlie’s eyes had been doing the telltale glistening, Laura had given herself many stern talkings-to, reminding herself that this, after all, was her plan, and reassuring herself, too, that she was pretty much in charge, more or less, because of her access to the e-mails. She wouldn’t let Charlie stray very far, and in the meantime she was going to learn so much from the experiment, the adventure, the gamble—the whatever it was.

“What do you think Jenna likes about you?” Laura said.

Charlie drummed his fingers on the kitchen table. “Is this Twenty Questions?”

“Maybe.”

“She likes me because, even though I’m scrawny, I’m a stud. She likes me because she has never met anyone as studly as myself.”

“But besides that. Why else?”

“Okay, okay.” He rested his head on his fists and thought awhile. “She likes me because she knows she’s not going to have to interview me about nuclear physics or international labor laws. She’s not going to have to keep—whatever they’re called—the Sunnis and the Shiites straight.”

“She likes you because you don’t know about anything important?”

“Bingo.”

“You’re restful to be with?”

“Restful, that’s it. Restful.”

Everything he’d told his wife was true. There were, however, several details that Charlie had omitted in the story of his date with Jenna. They had not spent time in the café but instead had ordered their coffee and morning buns to go. He had told her he’d like to show her a favorite spot in a county park, about six miles south of Hartley. They had driven in his car through town, past the ice-cream shop, the bait shop, the resale shop, and the therapist’s house, which was also her office. He told

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.