The Last Book Party(20)

I heard a car pull up the gravel driveway and a door slam. I quickly put the photographs back. Out the window, I saw a pickup truck in the driveway. I walked to the top of the stairs and peered down to the first floor. “Hello?”

I heard footsteps, and then saw a young woman holding a large pile of spiral notebooks enter the front hall. She was tall and chicly thin. Her dark hair was severe, nearly as short as a crew cut. She wore a black tank top and green painter’s pants and a silver ear cuff. With dark eyes and delicate features, her face was feminine and pretty, although her expression was stern. I guessed she was only a few years older than me, although I didn’t think I would ever look so deliberate.

She glanced up at me.

“And you are who?”

“I’m Henry’s assistant, Eve.”

I walked down the steps and put out my hand to shake hers. She looked down at the notebooks she was holding to indicate the foolishness of my gesture. She swung them around and stacked them on her hip, holding them with one hand, but still did not offer the other hand for me to shake.

“How’d he find you?” she said.

“Hodder, Strike,” I said, and then added, in an attempt to impress her, “And I’m a friend of Franny’s.”

“Are you now?” she said, in a mannered voice. I fingered the frayed edges of the zippered purple Cape Cod sweatshirt I had grabbed that morning on the way out of the house. “It’s kind of refreshing how much you don’t look the part.”

I didn’t know if she meant that I didn’t look like a friend of Franny’s or like any of Henry’s previous assistants. Either way, I was sure it wasn’t a compliment. I mustered up the courage to ask what she was doing there.

“I’m Lane Baxter,” she said. “Daughter of Eric.”

I wasn’t sure why she added that bit of trivia. Was I supposed to introduce myself as “daughter of Morris”?

She turned toward the kitchen. “Tea?”

I followed her and leaned against the counter as she filled the kettle, turned on the stove, and took mugs from a cabinet. She told me she had taken one of Tillie’s poetry classes at Yale and since graduating had worked for her from time to time proofreading, copyediting, managing some of the correspondence that Tillie didn’t need to do personally, and checking the French and Italian translations of Tillie’s poems. “I’m trilingual,” she said. “My father and I have moved around for his art.”

Of course. Her father was Eric Baxter, a well-known sculptor who lived in Provincetown.

Lane thumbed through the boxes of tea in the cupboard. She pulled out two bags of Red Zinger and asked how long I’d known Franny. I told her I’d met him at Tillie and Henry’s party in June.

“You were there?” she said, dropping the tea bags into the mugs.

“You were too?”

“Obviously,” she said. “So you don’t know Franny very well.”

“Well enough,” I said.

Leaning back against the counter, she folded her arms. “He’s a charmer, that one. A sorry mismatch with his parents though.”

“How so?”

I had no idea what she meant. The way I saw it, Franny was creative like his parents.

Lane lifted the kettle from the stove and filled the mugs with water. She sat down at the kitchen table, gesturing for me to sit opposite her. I did as she instructed.

“Franny isn’t bookish at all,” she said. “He doesn’t even read. I mean, I’m sure he can read—but it’s possible he’s dyslexic or something. He’s not in the slightest way intellectual or interested in literature or writing like Tillie and Henry.”

She went on, explaining that sometimes people have a child who is a perfect match for them and sometimes they get a mismatch.

“You know, like a guy who lives and breathes sports either gets a kid who’s a wonder on the baseball field, and of course the guy will give himself full credit for that, or he gets a kid who would sooner stab his eyes with a fork than play sports, in which case he blames his wife.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Or like the hippie, feminist mom who ends up with a girl who only wants to read Cosmopolitan.”

“Ha! Exactly,” said Lane, looking at me with surprise. I was pleased to have made her laugh. Despite her off-putting manner, Lane was amusing and smart, and I wanted her to like me.

“Franny doesn’t seem any the worse for it,” I said, trying to hide any evidence of how much time I had spent considering Franny’s psychology. “He’s happy, he’s talented, and, as you said, he’s a charmer.”

Lane blew on her tea.

“He’s a child,” she said.

“Isn’t he twenty-seven?”

“Precisely.”

I waited for her to continue.

“For as long as I’ve known them, Henry and Tillie have mistaken Franny’s lack of book smarts as a lack of intelligence. Rather than meeting him where he is, which is a perfectly fine place to be, they’ve let him stay in a bubble. They treat him like a child, and he remains a child.”

“He supports himself, doesn’t he?” I asked, her statement ringing true, yet making me want to come to Franny’s defense.

“To an extent,” Lane said. And then she waved a hand in the air as if to brush away this topic of conversation.