CHAPTER NINE
Not the Worst
On Jake’s own printed schedule he had the following morning off, but on the ride back to the hotel after the last book was signed Otis let him know of a new event, a morning interview for a radio show called Sunrise Seattle.
“Remote?” Jake had asked hopefully.
“No. In studio. It was last minute, but the program director really wants to make this work. She moved the host’s other stuff around to get you. Big fan.”
“Oh. Nice,” Jake said, though it wasn’t, really. He had a midday flight to San Francisco in the afternoon and an appearance at the Castro Theatre that night, then he had to be in Los Angeles the following morning for nearly a week of meetings related to the film adaptation. One of these was a lunch with the director. An A-list director, by anyone’s standard.
KBIK wasn’t far from their hotel and only a few blocks north of the Pike Place Market. Early the next morning, Jake left Otis to retrieve their bags from the taxi and entered the station’s lobby, where their obvious contact was waiting: a woman with gleaming gray hair held back off her face with a frankly girlish headband. He approached her with his hand outstretched and an entirely unnecessary: “I’m Jake Bonner.”
“Jake! Hi!”
They shook. Her hand was long and narrow, like the rest of her. She had bright blue eyes and he noticed that she wore not a lick of makeup. He liked that. Then he noticed that he liked that.
“And you are?”
“Oh! Sorry, I’m Anna Williams. Anna. I mean, please call me Anna. I’m the director of programming. This is so fantastic that we got you to come in. I love your book so much.”
“Well, thanks, that’s so nice of you to say.”
“Really, I couldn’t get it out of my head, the first time I read it.”
“First time!”
“Oh, I’ve read it a bunch of times. It’s just amazing to meet you.”
Otis arrived, dragging both their suitcases. He and Anna shook hands.
“So it’s a straight interview?” Otis asked. “Do you need Jake to read anything?”
“No. Not unless you want to?” She looked at Jake. She looked almost stricken, as if she’d failed to make this important inquiry.
“Not at all.” He smiled. He was trying to figure out how old she was. His own age? Or maybe a little bit younger. It was hard to tell. She was slender and wore black leggings and a kind of homespun tunic. Very Seattle. “Really, I’m pretty easygoing. Will people be calling in?”
“Oh, we never know. Randy’s a bit difficult to predict, he does everything on the fly. Sometimes he’ll take callers and sometimes he won’t.”
“Randy Johnson’s a Seattle institution,” Otis said helpfully. “What is it, like twenty years?”
“Twenty-two. Not all of it at this station. I don’t think he’s been off the air longer than a few days since he started.” She was holding her clipboard tightly against her chest. Those long hands gripped the edges.
“Well, I was delighted when I heard he wanted a novelist on!” Otis said. “Usually if we’re lucky enough to do Randy Johnson’s show it’s a sports biography, or sometimes politics. I can’t remember ever bringing a fiction writer in before today. You should be proud,” he said to Jake. “You got Randy Johnson to read a novel!”
“Ah,” said the woman, Anna Williams. “You know, I wish I could promise you that he’s read the whole novel. He’s been briefed, obviously, but you’re right, Randy’s not what you’d call a natural reader of fiction. He gets what a huge thing Crib has become, though. He likes to be on top of a cultural phenomenon whether it’s a novel or a pet rock.”
Jake sighed. In the early weeks of the book’s publication he’d endured more than a few interviews with people who hadn’t read the book, and answering their basic questions—So what’s your book about?—presented the significant challenges of describing Crib without giving away the plot’s now infamous twist. By now, everyone seemed to know what his book was about, which had been a relief in more ways than one. Also, it wasn’t fun covering for somebody’s total unfamiliarity with your work while trying to sound pleasant and engaged yourself.
They went upstairs to the studio and found the host, Randy Johnson, in mid-interview with a state senator and her constituent, both highly exercised by a new regulation related to dogs and their waste. Jake watched Johnson, a large and hirsute man with a definite tendency to spit, expertly play these two antagonists against each other until the constituent, at least, was red in the face and the senator was threatening to get up and leave the room.
“Oh, now, you don’t want to do that,” said Johnson, who was definitely suppressing his own laughter. “Look, let’s take a call.”
The producer, Anna Williams, brought Jake a bottle of water. Her fingers, slipping past his, were warm, but the water was cool. He looked at her. She was pretty; very, undeniably pretty. He had not paused to consider the prettiness of a woman for a very long time. There had been a woman he’d met on Bumble the previous summer and gone out to dinner with a couple of times. Before that, a woman who taught statistics at SUNY Cobleskill. Before that, Alice Logan, the poet he’d met at Ripley, though that petered out when she headed south to Johns Hopkins at the end of the summer. She was tenured there now, Jake knew. She’d sent him a brief, congratulatory email when Crib made the New York Times bestseller list.
“He’s about finished with those two,” she said quietly.
When the commercial break began she led him to the seat the angry constituent had just vacated and held the earphones open for him. Randy Johnson was studying some papers and drinking from a KBIK mug. “Hang on,” he said, without looking up. “Hang on a minute.”
“Sure,” said Jake. He looked around for Otis, but Otis wasn’t nearby. Anna Williams took the other chair and put on her own headset. She gave him an encouraging smile.
“He has some good questions,” she said, sounding less than certain. Obviously, she had written the questions herself. The uncertainty, Jake supposed, was whether the host would stick to them.
Just before they went back on air, Johnson looked up and grinned. “How you doing. Jack, right?”
“Jake,” said Jake. He reached across to shake the host’s hand. “Thanks for having me on.”
Randy Johnson grinned. “This one”—he pointed at Anna—“gave me no choice.”
“Well,” Jake said, turning to her. Anna was looking down at her clipboard, pretending not to listen.
“Looks like a featherweight, but she’s a heavyweight when it comes to getting her way.”
“That’s probably what makes her a great producer,” Jake said, as if this complete stranger needed him to defend her.
“Five seconds,” said a voice in Jake’s ears.
“Okay!” Randy Johnson said. “Ready, all?”
Jake was, he supposed. By now he’d sat in any number of chairs just like this one, and smiled genially at any number of local blowhards. He listened to Randy Johnson opine about unleashed dogs on the streets of Seattle for a while, and then heard what he understood to be his own introduction. “Okay, so our next guest is probably the hottest writer in America at the moment. Am I talking about Dan Brown or John Grisham? You’re probably getting pretty excited out there, am I right?”
He glanced at the woman beside him. Her sharp jaw was set and her eyes down on the clipboard.
“Well, too bad. But let me ask you something. Who out there’s read a new book called The Crib? Sounds like it’s about a baby. Is it about a baby?”
The host was silent then. After a horrified moment, Jake realized he was expected to actually answer this question.
“Uh, it’s Crib, not The Crib. And nothing really to do with a baby. To ‘crib’ something means to steal it, or purloin it. And … thanks for having me on, Randy. We had a great event in Seattle last night.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
He couldn’t remember the name of the actual hall. “Seattle Arts a
nd Lectures. It was at the symphony. Gorgeous place.”
“Yeah? That’s big. How big is that place?”
Really? Jake thought. Now he was expected to answer trivia questions about the host’s own city? But in fact he knew the answer.
“About twenty-four hundred, I think. I met some amazing people.”
Beside him, Anna held up a piece of paper, but to the host, not to Jake. FULL NAME: JACOB FINCH BONNER it read.
Randy made a face. “Jacob Finch Bonner. What kind of name is that?”
The kind I got at birth, Jake thought. Except for the Finch, of course.
“Well, everyone calls me Jake. I have to admit to adding the ‘Finch’ myself. After Scout, Jem, and Atticus.”
“After who?”
It was so hard not to shake his head. He had to fight against it.
“Characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was my favorite novel when I was a child.”
“Oh. Yeah, I think I got out of reading that by watching the movie.” Here he interrupted himself with his own approving laughter. “So you got this hot first novel, everybody’s reading it. Tell us what it’s about, Jake Finch.”
Jake tried for a laugh of his own. It came out sounding far less natural. “Just Jake! Well, there are things in this book I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t read it, so let’s just say it’s about a woman named Samantha who becomes a mother at a young age. Very young. Too young.”
“She was a naughty girl,” Randy commented.
Jake looked at him in some disbelief. “Well, not necessarily. But she sort of gives up her own life to have her child, and the two of them live together in a kind of isolated way, in the house Samantha herself grew up in. But they’re not close. And it gets worse between them as the daughter, Maria, becomes a teenager.”
“Oh, you mean it’s like my house,” he said delightedly.
Anna held up another sign. MORE THAN 2 MILL SOLD, it said. And under that: SPIELBERG DIRECTING MOVIE.
“So, Jake! I hear Steven Spielberg is making it into a movie. How’d you hook the big one?”
It was a relief, at least, to move the subject away from himself and even his book. Jake talked a bit about the film, and what a fan of Spielberg he’d always been. “It’s amazing to me that he connected so powerfully with this story.”
“Yeah, but why? I mean, the guy probably has his pick of every film project that’s out there. He picked The Crib. Why, do you think?”
Jake closed his eyes. “Well, I guess there was something in the characters that must have spoken to him. Or—”
“Oh, so like my daughter, who’s sixteen, and my wife, who start screaming at each other when they get up in the morning and don’t stop till midnight, I could get Steven Spielberg to make a movie about them? Because I’m down with that. My producer’s right here. Anna? Can we get Steven Spielberg on the phone? I’ll tell him whatever he’s paying Jake, I’ll sell him my wife and daughter for half.”
Jake stared at him in horror. He turned to look for Otis. No Otis. Not that Otis could have done anything.
“Okay!” Randy said with a flourish. “Let’s take some calls.”
He stabbed his console with a forefinger, and a woman with a low voice asked if she could ask Jake a question.
“Sure!” said Jake, far more enthusiastically than he felt. “Hi!”
“Hi. I love the book so much. I gave it to everyone in my office.”
“Oh, that’s so nice,” Jake said. “Do you have a question?”
“Yeah. I just wanted to know how you thought of that story. ’Cause I mean, I was really surprised.”
He searched in his cerebral file for the most appropriate of his prepared answers.
“I think when you’re writing a long story, like a novel, you don’t think of every part of the story at once. You think of one part, and then the next, and the next. So it sort of evolves—”
“Thanks,” Randy said, cutting off both the caller and Jake. “So you kind of make it up as you go along. You don’t write an outline beforehand?”
“I never have. That’s not to say I never will.”
“Hi there, you’re on with Randy.”
“Hi, Randy. Do you know if the city is planning to do anything about all the people doing drugs around Occidental Square? I was down there last weekend with my in-laws, and it was just ridiculous, you know?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” Randy concurred. “It’s never been this bad, and the city, it’s like: see no evil, hear no evil. You know what I think they ought to be doing about it?”
And he was off: the mayor, the council, the do-gooders handing out food and coupons, what was that supposed to accomplish? Jake looked at Anna, who was watching the host, her face ashen. There were no more scribbled signs. She seemed to have given up on that. And the time ran out.
“Okay, appreciate you coming in,” said Randy Johnson as soon as a car insurance ad began. “It was fun. I’ll look out for the film.”
I’m sure you will, Jake thought. He got to his feet. “Thanks for having me.”
“Thank Anna,” Randy said. “Her idea.”
“Well …” he started to say.
“Thanks, Anna.” It was Otis, finally in the doorway. “This was great.”
“I’ll walk you out,” said Anna. She went in front of him. He was suddenly far more nervous than he’d been while waiting for the interview to begin, or even after it had begun falling off the cliff that was Seattle institution Randy Johnson. Behind her, his eyes on her narrow back, the long gray hair between her shoulder blades, he descended the stairs to the ground floor. Then they were back in the lobby and Otis was retrieving their bags from behind the security guard’s desk.
“I am so sorry,” Anna said.
“Well, he’s not the worst.”
“No?”
He’d been pretty near the worst, actually. Anyone could be an idiot or a jerk, separately, but the combination of ignorance and mean-spiritedness—that was special.
“I’ve been asked if I paid somebody else to write my book for me. I’ve been asked to look at the interviewer’s child’s fiction. On the air. One woman on a TV show, just before it started, she said to me: ‘I’ve read the beginning and the end of your book and I thought it was just great.’”
“Shut up.” Anna grinned.
“Absolutely true. Of course it’s a ridiculous format: a few minutes on a radio show or a television show, to say anything substantive about a novel.”
“But he was … I just thought, y’know, he might rise to the occasion. He may not be a fiction guy, but he’s interested in people. If he’d read it he’d have been a completely different person. But obviously …”
Otis was on his phone, and frowning. He was probably ordering an Uber to SeaTac.
“Please, it’s fine.”
“No, I just, I wish I could make it up to you. Would you … do you have time for coffee? I mean, I’m sure you don’t. But there’s a good place at the Market …”
It seemed to have surprised her as much as it surprised him, and immediately she tried to walk it back. “Oh never mind! You probably need to get going. Please forget I asked.”
“I’d love to,” said Jake.
CHAPTER TEN
Utica
She took him to a place on the top floor of a building opposite the market, and insisted on getting the coffee. It was a local chain called Storyville, and the place was warm with a fire going and a window overlooking the Public Market sign. She had recovered her cool at some point on the walk over and seemed almost serene. She was also exponentially more beautiful with every passing moment.
Anna Williams was not a Seattle native. She’d grown up in northern Idaho and moved the rest of the way west for college at the University of Washington—“famous for being Ted Bundy’s first playground”—after which she’d spent a decade out on Whidbey Island working for a small radio station.
“What was that like?” said Jake.
“Oldies an
d talk. An unusual combination.”
“No, I meant living on an island.”
“Oh. You know. Quiet. I was in a little town called Coupeville, where the station was. Lots of weekenders from the city, so it never felt that remote. And you know, we’re all used to the ferries up here. I don’t think ‘island’ really means to Seattle people what it means to other people.”
“Do you get back to Idaho?” he asked.
“Not since my adoptive mom died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” A moment later, he said: “So, you were adopted?”
“Never formally. My mom—my adoptive mom—was actually my teacher. I had a really bad situation at home, and Miss Royce just sort of took me in. I think everyone in our town understood my circumstances. There was kind of a silent agreement that no one would look too close or involve the authorities. I got more stability from her in a couple of years than I’d had my whole life before that.”
Clearly they were poised at the edge of a fathomless lake. There were many things he wanted to know, but it was hardly the right moment.
“It’s wonderful when the right person comes into your life at the right time.”
“Well.” Anna shrugged. “Right time, I don’t know. A few years earlier would have been even better. But I certainly was able to appreciate what I had, while I had it. And I was extremely fond of her. I was a junior at the university when she got ill. I went home to take care of her. That’s when my hair turned gray.”
Jake looked at her. “Really? I’ve heard of that. Overnight, right?”
“No, it wasn’t like that. The way people talk about it, it sounds like you wake up in the morning and BAM—every strand’s been replaced. For me it just started to grow out and everything new was this color. That was kind of a shock of its own, but after a while I decided it was kind of an opportunity. I could go any direction I wanted with it. I did color it for the first couple of years, but eventually I decided I liked it like this. I liked that it was a little bit confusing. Not for myself, but for other people.”
The Plot Page 8
