Page 120 of Bad Words

Hi Dad,

I

“Not my best work,” she said.

“Hey. It’ll come.” I hesitated. “Are you still trying to defend your career to them?”

“Apparently, which is ridiculous after this long. I can’t think of a defense that could change anything.” Selina snapped the laptop shut. “For years I’ve felt like they’re just waiting for my career to collapse, so that when it all disappears on me, everything they said will be vindicated.” Frown lines curved down the middle of her forehead. “I hate being locked in this open-ended question of who’s going to wind up right or wrong. This is my life.”

“What career did they want you to have?”

“I was prelaw before I switched to an English major. They loved that idea.” She gave me a furtive glance from under her eyelashes. “You’re always solving things. For your family. What would you do?”

“I don’t know if I solve things. Smooth them over, maybe.” I paused. “What are your parents like? Their personalities, I mean?”

She drew a pillow into her lap. “They’re very risk-averse people. They’re always thinking about the future. My dad’s a nephrologist, so they’re pretty well-off, but when I was a kid, we lived in a little rowhouse and didn’t go out to eat and only bought new clothes once in a blue moon. I know that mindset is where they’re coming from. And obviously I would also love a financial cushion and a safety net. But—” She smoothed a ripple in her silk robe against her thighs. “This is probably ungenerous, but sometimes it seems to me like their entire life is a contingency plan.”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “Considering what they put you through in school, I think it’s more than generous that you’re still trying to see this from their perspective. I wish they’d try to see more of yours.”

Selina’s brow relaxed. She rose and, standing behind the desk chair, tucked her chin into the crook of my neck. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“You’ll figure out what to say.”

“Hope so.” She kissed the side of my neck, then looked unabashedly at my laptop. “The new book?”

I fought the instinct to turn off my screen. Between what I’d transcribed from my journal and what I’d drafted into the Word doc, I had about twenty pages, which felt very vulnerable just then. “Yeah.”

“May I read it?”

I scrolled back up to the top of the document, considering. “I think so. It’s readable through page ten or so.” I stood, kissed her. “I’m going to make some tea. I’ll bring you some.”

“Thank you,” she said, but she was already reading, already somewhere else.

I watched the kettle come to a boil, part of me still in the bedroom with her. Mugs in hand, I returned to the bedroom doorway and watched her, seated at the desk with her head bowed over my laptop, meeting my miniaturist and my celebrity, focus making her face taut. The image I’d failed for four years to imagine.

Eventually she looked up at me.

“What do you think?” I asked, and the feeling of vulnerability intensified, as though I were standing naked in front of someone in plate armor. What if Selina hated this, too? What if she hated everything I ever wrote? She wouldn’t lie to me. How could I live with that?

I sipped from my mug and burned my mouth and said, trying to sound casual, “At this point I don’t know why I care.”

“Of course you know why. You’re a brilliant person. You want to make brilliant work that touches people.” She arched one brow. “And for some reason, you seem to care about my opinion, specifically.”

“Guilty.” The words gave me enough strength to approach her, to set the mugs on her desk. “So?”

A smile touched her lips. “I like these pages, Parker.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I think it’s a really deft, restrained opening.” She rested her fingertips on my wrist. “It seems like you know what you want to say.”

“Yeah,” I said, touching her cheek. “Yeah, I do.”

I went out with my friends from San Francisco on Friday night, and Selina told me she’d be asleep by the time we finished—Your youthful thirty-two-year-old energy, it’s too much for an ancient hag like me—and so I crawled into my own bed at the end of the night, missing her.

I woke up on Saturday to my door swinging gently open, the morning light dimmed by my shades, and Arthur’s silhouette crossing from the threshold to the end of my bed.

“Hey,” I said sleepily. “What’s going on? You all right?”