The Book Eaters(16)
Hazel-Eyes squinted at her skeptically. “Do you really think that?”
“No, I guess not.” Devon drained the last of her Guinness. “I don’t have much luck with people.” True on so many levels.
“I think you just haven’t met the right person.” Hazel-Eyes climbed onto the bar stool. Her feet didn’t touch the floor when she sat, unlike Devon’s. “Or else you don’t give anyone a chance.”
“Little of column A, and a little of column B.” Devon crumpled a napkin in her palm. She was thinking about how Cai flicked his tongue when he was hungry. “So, um. What’s your name? If we’re both stuck here, waiting.”
“Hester. Like that poor woman in Hawthorne’s book, The Scarlet Letter? Terribly pretentious, I know.” Her grin was self-deprecating.
“Ah, that’s not so bad, it’s a pretty enough name. Try being a woman called Devon.”
Hester snorted. “All right, you win. Let me guess, that’s where you were conceived?”
“Nah, Family tradition,” Devon said. “A lot of us have location names.” Then she added, with rare recklessness, “It was also my grandmother’s name, I’m told. She had it worse—her surname was Davenport.”
“She was a—oh, I see. Devon Davenport. Ouch.” A light, easy laugh. Belonging to someone with a light, easy conscience, no doubt. “Where are you from, anyway? You don’t sound like a Geordie.”
“Um.” The question hit hard, bringing Devon back to reality. Her past was problematic and her goal was to meet Chris, and keep Cai fed. How was this nonsense chat furthering either goal? She needed to end the encounter.
“I’m guessing Derby,” Hester said, crossing and uncrossing her legs. Her shoes were either brand-new, or meticulously polished. “Devon from Derby. Am I close?”
But Devon was hungry, too, in her own way. She craved company from someone her own age, who was pleasant and affable and not just another hapless old man. What was another hour of time, in the end? It would keep the disappointment of her failed meeting at bay, at least.
“Hey, are you all right? Was it something I said?”
“Sorry, it’s just this pub. All these Christmas lights give me a headache.” Devon pushed away her empty glass. “Would you mind if we got out of here and went somewhere quieter? It’s so noisy, I can hardly hear you and—”
Hester hopped off the stool and straightened her odd blouse. “I know just the place, and it’s only a short walk.”
Devon forced a grin, trying to enjoy the moment. What else was there, after all? Chris wasn’t coming.
They squeezed out of the crowd, half tumbling to the street. Darkness softened civilization’s hard neon edges, and the sudden lack of bodies created a vacuum of calm.
“Do you do this a lot?” Devon wished she could take off her stuffy jacket. “Get stood up on a date and pick someone else, I mean.”
“Is this a date?”
“Doesn’t have to be.” Careful, she told herself. Not too eager, not too desperate. “Where are we going?”
Hester steered them down a couple of blocks and bought a fresh set of drinks from a quayside pub. They must have looked an odd pair, Devon in her heeled boots and severe, dark clothes; Hester, short and pastel and fluttering. But Newcastle had its share of odd folk and no one commented.
Drinks bought, they sat outside in the beer garden despite the chill, people-watching and talking about nothing in particular. Hester chatted easily about books, films, the weather, and various other things like they’d been friends for years—a trait that Devon, who had gone without friends for most of her life, found very odd. And having little she wanted to say about herself, she simply listened as much as she could.
Maybe this was what it felt like to be human and normal, if such a thing as “normal” existed, even among humans. Was this a life she would have wanted? So impossible to judge. The world was a series of fenced-off fields, each patch of grass categorically greener than its neighbors.
When Devon had been young, she’d wanted to sometimes read books and sometimes eat books, rather than always eating them, but the main thing was choosing her own books, deciding how to shape and immerse herself.
That basic desire hadn’t changed with age. She craved, still, a sense that she had options, that her life wasn’t an inevitable series of events. Everything in her childhood had been prearranged, her personality and outlook sculpted to fit into the Fairweather narrative. The Families’ narrative.
“Either you’re the best listener I’ve ever met, or you’re very mysterious and trying to stay silent,” Hester said, after her own chatter had drifted to a standstill.
“I think you’ve confused mysterious for boring. There’s nothing to know, honestly.” Nothing that would interest a human woman, anyway.
“Oh yeah? I bet I can guess.” Hester sat up, leaning forward. “Let’s see. I bet … I bet your parents are divorced, and that’s why you’re so aloof.” She grinned, sipping her bourbon and Coke.
“More separated than divorced.” Devon wondered if her mother still cared about a small girl abandoned to Fairweather Manor. She added defensively, “I’m not that aloof. We’re talking, aren’t we?”