“What?”

“Well, I tried to get my sister to come with me, but she refused. She wanted to stay with our aunt. And then one day the two of them just left town.”

Jake waited. As he did, he grew more uneasy.

“And?”

“And? Nothing. I have no idea where they are. They could be anywhere, now. They could be nowhere. They could be in this restaurant.” She glanced around. “Well, they’re not. But that’s just how it is. I stayed, they left. I finished high school. I went to college. My teacher—I got into the habit of calling her my adoptive mother, but there was never any formal process. She died. She left me a little money, which was nice. But my sister, I have no idea.”

“Did you ever try to find her?” Jake asked.

Anna shook her head. “No. I think our aunt had been living a pretty marginal life before she came to take care of us. Or try to take care of us. I think, if they’re still together, they’re not going to be paying rent or using an ATM, let alone on Facebook. But I’m on Facebook and also Instagram, mainly for that reason. If they want to find me, I’m a few clicks away from any public computer in any library in the country. If they reach out to me I’ll get an alert through my email. I try not to think about it, ever, but even so … every single time I turn on my computer or my phone, some part of me is wondering: Is today the day? You can’t imagine what that’s like, waiting for some message that’s going to totally upend your life.”

In fact, Jake absolutely could imagine it. But he didn’t say so.

“Did it … I mean, did all of this make you feel depressed? As a teenager?”

She seemed not to take the question all that seriously. “I suppose. Most teenagers get depressed, don’t they? I don’t think I was all that introspective as a kid. And frankly I also wasn’t very ambitious back then, so it’s not like I felt I was being kept from something I really wanted. And then one morning, the fall of my senior year, I picked up an application off a bench outside the guidance counselor’s office at my school, for the University of Washington. It had these pine trees on the cover and I just thought … you know, that looks so nice. It looked like home. So I filled it out right there in the office, on their computer. Three weeks later I got my letter.”

The waiter returned and took their plates. They both declined dessert, but asked for more wine.

“You know,” Jake said, “if you think about it, you’re amazingly well-adjusted.”

“Oh, right.” She rolled her eyes. “I hid away on an island for the better part of a decade. I got to my mid-thirties without ever having a serious boyfriend. For the past three years I’ve devoted myself to making a complete imbecile sound semi-cogent and semi-informed on the air. Does that sound amazingly well-adjusted to you?”

He smiled at her. “Given what you’ve gone through? I think you’re some kind of Wonder Woman.”

“Wonder Woman was a fiction. I think I’d prefer to be an ordinary real person.”

She could never be ordinary, he thought. The sheer fact of her, this lovely, gray-haired woman out of the forests of the Northwest yet seamlessly present, here, in a thrumming restaurant in the city’s buzziest neighborhood, was simply norm-defying: a thunderbolt out of the blue. But what stunned him most, he realized, was the fact that he was so entirely at peace about all of it. For as long as Jake could remember he’d been torturing himself about the books he was writing, and then the ones he wasn’t writing, and the people surging past him in line, and the deep and terrible fear that he wasn’t good enough—or good at all—at the only thing he’d ever wanted to be good at, not to mention the fact that all around him people his own age were meeting and pairing off and pledging their allegiance to one another and even creating entirely new baby people together, while he’d barely found a woman he liked enough to date since breaking up with the poet, Alice Logan. Now, all of that was done: suddenly, peacefully, done.

“First of all,” said Jake, “making your boss sound smarter than he is—that’s what most people’s jobs are. And Whidbey Island seems to me like a pretty nice place to spend the better part of a decade. And as far as not having a serious boyfriend, obviously, you were waiting for me.”

She hadn’t been looking at him through this. She’d been looking down into her own hands and the glass they held. Now, though, she looked up, and after a moment, she smiled. “Maybe I was,” she said. “Maybe I thought, when I read your novel, Now this is a brain I could stand to get to know. Maybe when I went to your event in Seattle and I saw you, I thought, That’s a person I wouldn’t be miserable looking at across the breakfast table.”

“Breakfast table!” Jake grinned.

“And maybe when I got in touch with your publicist I wasn’t just thinking how we should be trying to get some real authors on the show. Maybe I was thinking, You know, it wouldn’t actually be horrible if I could get to meet Jake Bonner.”

“Well now. So it comes out.”

Even in the restaurant’s inadequate light he could see she was embarrassed.

“Look, it’s fine. I’m glad you did. I’m incredibly glad.”

Anna nodded, but she wasn’t looking him in the eye.

“And you’re positive this isn’t freaking you out at all. I acted unprofessionally because I had a crush on a famous author.”

He shrugged. “I once contrived to sit next to Peter Carey on the subway, because I had this fantasy that I could strike up a conversation with Australia’s greatest living novelist, and we’d start having weekly Sunday brunches together where we’d discuss the state of fiction, and then he’d give my novel-in-progress to his agent … you get the idea.”

“Well, did you?”

Jake took a sip of his wine. “Did I what?”

“Sit next to him.”

He nodded. “Yeah. But I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. And he got off like two stops later, anyway. No conversation, no brunch, no introduction to his agent. Just another fan on the subway. That could have been us, if you’d been as much of a wuss as I am. But you actually reached out for something you wanted. Just like you picked up that application, off the bench, and filled it out. I admire that.”

Anna said nothing. She seemed overwhelmed.

“Like your old professor said, nobody else gets to own your life, right?”

She laughed. “Nobody else gets to live your life.”

“It sounds like that pabulum we used to serve up in the MFA program. Only you can tell your singular story with your unique voice.”

“And that’s not true?”

“That is absolutely not true. Anyway, if you’re living your life, more power to you. I can’t think of anyone you owe a thing to. Your adoptive mom is gone. Your sister and aunt took themselves out of the equation, for now at least. You deserve every bit of happiness that’s coming to you.”

She reached across the table and took his hand. “I completely agree,” she said.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 36–38

Her decision was: she wanted an abortion. It should have been straightforward, given the fact that her parents seemed to want an addition to their family about as little as she did. But there was an unfortunate complication, namely that her mother and father were Christians, and not the Jesus-is-love kind of Christians but the Hell-has-a-special-room-waiting-for-you kind. Also, the laws of the state of New York gave them veto power over Samantha (who was very much not a Christian of either kind, despite her hundreds of Sunday mornings in the pews of the Fellowship Tabernacle of Norwich) and over the blastocyst inches south of her navel. Did they regard said blastocyst as a beloved grandchild, or at least a beloved child of God? Samantha suspected not. She suspected, to the contrary, that the point here was to teach her some kind of “lesson” about the wages of her sin, something along the lines of In pain you shall bring forth children. It would all have been so much simpler if they’d just agreed to drive her to the clinic in Ithaca.