Halfway to You(38)
I picked up the phone and dialed.
It rang, and rang, and each time it rang, my heart cracked a little wider. When I heard the voice mail tone, I hung up. I told myself she wasn’t answering because she was on her way. Maybe she was already sitting in the audience.
When the time came, I followed Lisa out to the small podium. Eighty people had come, all crammed into sixty chairs, overflowing into the neighboring aisles of bookshelves. I searched the faces for one that resembled an older version of my own. Perhaps she’d hit traffic.
Throughout my reading, I periodically glanced toward the door, willing my mother to walk through. But then the reading was over, and still she had not come.
After the clapping died down, Lisa fielded audience questions for me to answer. Chasing Shadows was currently number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and despite the book being so new, many audience members had already read it. My voice sounded crisp but unrecognizable to my own ears through the microphone. I offered the same responses I’d been parroting for the past month. Vague answers to prying questions about Jane’s absent mother, Jane’s messy romantic life, Jane’s terrible loneliness—trying to convince people that it was all fiction.
I could barely hear myself over the roaring disappointment in my head.
Finally, I was led to a nearby table to sign books. People lined up, clutching their to-be-signed books. I asked for names, spellings. My fingers began to cramp from scribbling my signature; the loops always flattened as a signing went on, my hand forgetting the shape of my own name, like saying a word so many times it loses meaning.
Without Mom there, all of it lost meaning. I didn’t want to want her pride, but I did. So I clung to the last thread of hope that she would show. Every so often, my eyes flicked past the immediate reader to the line stretching behind them, out of view. Maybe I had missed a face. My heart clenched each time my gaze roved the queue of strangers with no recognition.
I kept signing. And what’s your name? How do you spell that? Thank you for coming. The fancy pen Keith had bought me glided over the thick title pages, ink interrupting the textured off-white paper. There were a few Chasing Shadows phrases I cycled through: Good luck in your chase, and Nurture your shadow, and Love is worth it. Clever little things that related to the book and sounded inspiring but were, in fact, useless platitudes.
No wonder my mother hadn’t shown up; her daughter was a hack.
As I greeted the next reader, I spotted Keith at the end of the line, about fifteen people back. He was talking to someone I couldn’t see from my low vantage point at the table. I leaned, trying to see past the crowd, but I couldn’t make out a face—just a flicker of auburn hair. Like mine.
The person in front of me cleared his throat. “Can you make it out to my wife? She couldn’t come tonight.”
I blinked, refocusing on his features. He wore a gray pinstripe work shirt with the name Price sewn in red cursive over his heart. “Sure,” I said. “How do you spell your wife’s name?”
I glanced at Keith again, my heart swelling. Had she come, after all? Had Keith seen her in the crowd and recognized her?
I blinked back to the man in front of me. “Can you spell it one more time?”
“P-a-m,” he said, a slight frown pulling the corner of his mouth.
I pressed my lips together, embarrassed by my own lack of attention. “Pam? What a coincidence, that’s my mother’s name.”
He merely shrugged.
Still resisting my urge to glance past the man to spot the woman-who-might-be-my-mother at the back of the line, I wrote his wife a special note in the book and handed it back to him. “I’m sorry I’m distracted—it’s been a long tour.”
“No problem.” He smiled, then plodded away.
From my seat, bodies blocked my view considerably; there were still ten more readers. As I signed more books, Keith and possibly-my-mother inched closer. I worked faster, reeling them in with my pen. One book, then another. The line shifted, and a gap occurred. The person talking to Keith pivoted into view.
My heart screwed tight. The muscles in my pen hand twitched. It wasn’t her. The woman with my mother’s hair had a fresh face and a name tag on her blazer—a bookstore employee.
Mom had really not come.
I signed the rest of the books in haste, and then the event was over, and the red-haired employee was taking down the display of my books. Lisa and Kim came over to congratulate me on a successful visit. I don’t recall what Keith said to them. I stared at the shelves of books surrounding us and imagined their collective weight on my chest, pressing down. I had the urge to write my frustration into my notebook—always scribbling my feelings away—and yet I was tempted to never write another word again. Because no matter how many words I wrote, my mother would never care to read them.
After a quick nap at my hotel, I climbed into the passenger side of Keith’s rental car to drive to my surprise final event. My eyes were gritty and my mouth tasted stale; in an act of defiance, I hadn’t even brushed my pillow hair.
“Where’s Kim?” I asked, buckling my seat belt. My mood had not improved—in fact, I felt even more dejected—but at least the sleep had recovered some energy.
“I told her to take tonight off.”
“What, my publicist can take the night off, but I can’t?”
“We don’t need her for this reading.”