He went back to Ruth Steuben’s spreadsheet for Martin Purcell’s email address, opened up Gmail, and wrote:

Hi Martin, this is Jake Bonner, from the Ripley program. Sorry to email you out of the blue, but wondered if I could give you a call about something? Let me know when might be a good time to chat, or feel free to phone me whenever you like. Very best to you, Jake.

And he added his phone number.

The dude called immediately.

“Oh wow,” he said as soon as Jake answered. “I can’t believe you emailed me. This isn’t some kind of Ripley fundraising thing, is it? Because I can’t right now.”

“No, no,” Jake said. “Nothing like that. Look, we’ve probably met, but I don’t have my Ripley files with me so I’m not sure if you were in my class or not.”

“I wish I was in your class. That guy I got assigned to, all he wanted us to do was write about place. Place, place, place. Like, every blade of grass had to have its own backstory. That was his thing.”

He had to be talking about Bruce O’Reilly, the retired Colby professor and profoundly Maine-centric novelist with whom Jake had had an annual beer at The Ripley Inn. Jake hadn’t thought about Bruce O’Reilly in years.

“That’s too bad. It’s better if they move students around. Then everyone gets to work with everyone.”

It had also been years since he’d given any thought at all to the institutionalized teaching of creative writing. He hadn’t missed it.

“I have to tell you, I loved your book. Man, that twist, I was like, holy crap.”

No special significance to “that twist,” Jake noted with intense relief. Certainly no: And I’ve got a pretty good idea where that came from.

“Well, that’s kind of you to say. But the reason I got in touch, I just heard that a student of mine passed away. And I saw your post on that Ripley Facebook page. So I thought—”

“Evan, you’re talking about. Right?” said Martin Purcell.

“Yes. Evan Parker. He was my student.”

“Oh, I know.” All the way up in northern Vermont Jake could hear Martin Purcell chuckle. “I’m sorry to say, not your fan, though. But I wouldn’t take that too personally. Evan didn’t think anyone at Ripley was good enough to be his teacher.”

Jake took a moment to run through this sentence slowly. “I see,” he said.

“I could tell within an hour or two, just that first night of the residency, Evan wasn’t going to get much out of the program. If you’re going to learn something, you need to have curiosity about it. He didn’t have that. But he was still a cool guy to hang around with. Lot of charm. Lot of fun.”

“And you kept in touch with him, obviously.”

“Oh yeah. Sometimes he came up to Burlington, for a concert or something. We went to the Eagles together. I think he came up for Foo Fighters, too. And sometimes I drove down. He had a tavern down in Rutland, you know.”

“Well, I don’t really know. Would you mind telling me a little bit more? I just feel so badly I’m only hearing about this now. I would have written to his family when it happened.”

“Hey, would you give me a second?” said Martin Purcell. “Let me just tell my wife I’m on a call. I’ll be right back.”

Jake waited. “I hope I’m not taking you away from anything important,” he said, when Purcell returned.

“Not at all. I said I’ve got a famous novelist on the phone. That kind of trumps talking to our fifteen-year-old about the party we don’t want her going to.” He stopped to laugh at his own wit. Jake forced himself to join in.

“So, do you know anything about Evan’s family? I suppose it’s too late for a condolence note.”

“Well, even if it’s not, I don’t know who you’d send it to. His parents died a long time ago. He had a sister who also passed, before he did.” He paused. “Hey, I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but I never got the impression you two had much of a … rapport. I’m a teacher, myself, so I’m sympathetic to anyone who has to deal with a difficult student. I wouldn’t have wanted to be Evan’s teacher. Every class has that person who slouches in his chair and just glares at you, like, Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“And What makes you think you have a damn thing you can teach me?”

“Exactly.”

Jake had been jotting down notes: parents, sister—deceased.

He knew all that from the obituary.

“Yeah, that was definitely Evan in that particular class. But I was used to having an Evan. My first year of teaching, my answer to ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ would have been ‘I’m nobody. Who are you?’”

He could hear Martin laugh. “Dickinson.”

“Yeah. And I’d have been out of the room.”

“Crying in the bathroom.”

“Well.” Jake frowned.

“I meant me. Crying in the bathroom. First year as a student teacher. You have to toughen up. But most of those kids, they’re just marsh-mallows, really. And seriously miserable, in their own lives. Sometimes they’re the ones you worry about most of all, because they have no sense of themselves, no confidence at all. But that wasn’t Evan. I’ve seen plenty of false bravado—that wasn’t Evan either. He had absolute faith in his ability to write a great book. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say he thought writing a great book wasn’t all that hard, and why shouldn’t he be able to do it? Most of us weren’t like that.”

Here Jake noted a cue—endemic among writers—to ask about Martin’s own work.

“I haven’t made much progress since finishing the program, to be honest.”

“Yes. Every day’s a challenge.”

“You seem to be doing okay,” Martin said. There was an edge to that.

“Not with my book in progress.”

He was surprised to hear himself say it. He was surprised that he’d given Martin Purcell of Burlington, Vermont, a complete stranger, more of a suggestion of his vulnerability than he’d given his own editor or agent.

“Well, sorry to hear that.”

“No it’s okay, just need to push through. Hey, do you know where Evan was with his own book? Did he get much done after the residency? He was just at the start, I think. At least the pages I saw.”

Martin said nothing, for the longest seconds of Jake’s life. Finally, he apologized. “I’m just trying to remember if he ever talked about that. I don’t think he ever told me how it was going. But if he was using again, and it looks like he was, I really doubt he was sitting down at his desk and turning out pages.”

“Well, how many pages do you think he had?”

Again, that uncomfortable pause.

“Were you thinking of doing something for him? I mean, for his work? Because that’s incredibly kind of you. Especially since he wasn’t exactly a fawning acolyte, if you know what I mean.”

Jake took a breath. He was not, of course, entitled to the approbation, but he supposed he’d better go with it.

“I just thought, you know, maybe there’s a completed story I could send somewhere. You don’t have any pages, yourself, I suppose.”

“No. But you know, I wouldn’t say we’re talking about Nabokov, here, leaving behind an unfinished novel. I think you can consign the unwritten fiction of Evan Parker to history without too much guilt.”

“I’m sorry?” Jake gasped.

“As his teacher.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Because I remember thinking—and I liked the guy—that he had to be pretty far off base the way he talked about this book. Like it was The Shining and The Grapes Of Wrath and Moby-Dick, all rolled into one, and what a huge success it was going to be. He did show me a couple of pages about this girl who hated her mother, or maybe it was the mother who hated her, and they were okay, but, you know, it wasn’t exactly Gone Girl. I just kind of looked at him, like, Yeah, dude, whatever. I don’t know, I just thought he was kind of ridiculously full of himself. But you’ve probably come across a lot of people like that. Man,” said Martin Purcell, “I sound like an asshole. And I liked the guy. It’s really decent of you to want to help him.”

“I just wanted to do something good,” Jake said, deflecting as best he could. “And since there isn’t any family …”

“Well, maybe a niece. I think I read about her in the obituary.”

Me, too, Jake didn’t say. In fact, he hadn’t learned a single thing from Martin Purcell that hadn’t been in that bare-bones obituary.

“Okay,” Jake said. “Look, thanks for talking to me.”

“Hey! Thanks for calling. And …”

“What?” said Jake.

“Well, I’m going to kick myself in exactly five minutes if I don’t ask you this, but …”

“What is it?” said Jake, who knew perfectly well.

“I was wondering, I know you’re busy. But would you be willing to look at some of my stuff? I’d love to have your honest opinion. It would mean so much to me.”

Jake closed his eyes. “Of course,” he said.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 23–25