Chapter 5

Will's little travel alarm clock went off at six in the morning, and he silenced it swiftly before it could wake up his mother sleeping in the guest room next to the living room. He raised himself from the couch and ambled over to the bathroom, where he opted for a quick and quiet cat wash in the sink instead of a shower.

When he left the bathroom, the kitchen was lit, and he could hear someone rummaging around in the cabinets. He finished dressing and then went over to investigate.

"Mom, what are you doing up so early?"

Kate was searching through the cabinet over the kitchen sink, where a motley collection of spices and condiment containers formed a precariously unstable stack. As he watched, his mother's grasping hand disturbed the equilibrium of the stacked boxes, and several of them came clattering down onto the sink.

"I was going to make you some breakfast before you head back, but I can't find the tea. It seems like they put it in a different cupboard every evening just to mess with me."

Will stooped down to collect some of the containers.

"That's okay, mom. I'm not hungry. I'll probably just have a glass of orange juice and two aspirin for breakfast."

"Nonsense," Kate scoffed. "You'll get hungry by eight o'clock, and then you'll pull into some drive-through and load up on those awful egg muffin things."

"Nothing wrong with those. Breakfast of champions."

"Breakfast of people who don't know how to cook real food," Kate retorted. "They don't even put real eggs into those. God, it's a wonder you don't weigh three hundred pounds. Ah, here we go."

She fished a box of teabags out of the cupboard and stepped over to the stove. Will shoveled the dropped containers of salad dressing and gourmet croutons back into the cupboard and closed the door before another avalanche could come raining down.

"You want your eggs scrambled or over easy?"

Will rolled his eyes, but leaned in to kiss his mother on the cheek, surrendering to the inevitable.

"If I can't talk you out of it, make 'em scrambled. With cheddar, if there's any in the fridge that hasn't grown fur yet."

When Kate had made a batch of scrambled eggs with cheddar, she piled some of it onto a plate and placed it in front of Will on the kitchen table. Then she made up a plate for herself and sat down in the chair across the table from him. Will dug into his scrambled eggs, but stopped his fork after the second bite when he noticed his mother's amused gaze on him.

"What, mom?"

"Just wondering how your date went last night. The one with the girl from the bookstore?"

"She's thirty-three, mom. Hardly a girl. And the evening was fine, thank you for asking."

"Well, good. I'm glad. It's rare to see you in a good mood these days."

"What do you mean, mom?" Will eyed his mother over his plate of eggs. "Am I really that much of a grump?"

Kate shrugged her shoulders and picked up another fork tip of eggs.

"Well, yes. Sometimes you're pretty insufferable, especially around Bob."

"Oh, come on, mom. We're siblings. We're supposed to be at each other's throats. We've always been giving each other a hard time, since we were kids."

"No," Kate shook her head. "He grew out of it once you two were out of high school. So did you, for a while at least. Now you're back to holding your nose when he walks by, and he's just trying to have a normal relationship with you."

Will was about to launch an indignant response, but at that moment Erica walked into the kitchen, pajama-clad and bleary-eyed.

"'Morning."

"Good morning, sweetie," Kate replied. "What are you doing out of bed at six thirty in the morning?"

"Saying bye to Uncle Will." Erica opened the fridge and examined its contents for a second. "Crap. Out of orange juice, again."

"Do you want some tea instead? The water is still hot."

"I suppose." Erica walked over to the kitchen table and dropped herself into the chair next to Will.

"You look all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning," Will remarked with a smile as she planted her forearms onto the kitchen table and lowered her face onto them, her hair spreading out like an auburn fan.

"I know," she moaned. "I was up way too late last night playing on the computer."

"Maybe having your own computer in your room isn't such a great idea," Kate said, shooting Will a displeased look which he shrugged off with a smirk.

"No, no, it's okay," Erica assured, raising her head from the table. "It's just that it's all new."

"It's like when you get your first car," Will said. "The first week or two, they'll have to pry you out from behind the wheel, but then it just becomes routine."

Erica had perked up visibly at the mention of her first car, and Will shook his head with a laugh.

"Oh, no, dear niece. If I give you that BMW as well, your dad will never speak to me again."

"Oh, yes, he would," Erica said, frowning. "He'd just use it for himself and let me drive that shi- err, nasty truck of his." She shot a sidelong glance at Kate, who was back at the stove, dropping a tea bag into a mug.

"Your father would do no such thing," Kate admonished her granddaughter. "I bet he's already shopping for a car for you. Something nice and big and safe."

Erica looked at Will and flashed a triumphant grin.

"I got my permit a few weeks ago," she said. "Five months to go until the big one-six."

"Excellent," Will smiled. "I loved my first car. It was a piece of crap, but it was freedom."

"What kind was it?" Erica asked.

"A shitty little 1976 Dodge Dart. It was that bright signal orange color they liked back in those days. Ugly as hell, but at least you didn't have to search for your car in a parking lot, I tell you that."

"I don't care what kind of car I get, as long as it has four wheels and a roof," Erica said wistfully. "It'll be so nice not to have to ask mom or dad to drive me to the mall."

At the stove, Kate lifted the water kettle and prepared to pour Erica's tea water, her other hand holding a container of half-and-half.

"Whoa, mom. Hold on there." Will raised himself from his chair and stepped over to the stove.

"You take milk in your tea?" he asked Erica, who nodded.

"Never pour the water before the milk," he said to Kate as he took the kettle out of her hand. He took the milk as well, poured some half-and-half into the tea mug, and then topped it off with water.

"You don't want your milk to scald, which is what happens when you dump it into hot tea. Always pour the milk first."

"Well, look who's getting all fancy on us," Kate said, rolling her eyes. "Apparently, making tea for fifty years hasn't adequately prepared me for making my granddaughter a cup of it."

"Oh, you can drink it like that, but only if you don't mind looking like a commoner," Will said, winking at Erica.

"You come from a long and proud line of commoners," Kate said. "You can get as fancy as you'd like, but I'm still the one who had to clean up after you took off your full diaper and kicked it around the living room when you were two."

"Yuck." Erica stuck out her tongue. "I'm not sure I still want breakfast, grandma."

After breakfast, Will carried his bag out to the car, opening and closing his car door quietly despite Erica's insistence that nothing short of a nuclear blast would wake up Bob and Christa before eight o'clock on a weekend morning. When he had the car arranged properly—bag stowed in the trunk, cell phone plugged in, fresh bottle of water in the cupholder—he returned to the house to say his good-byes.

"Drive carefully, sweetie. And stop by in Augusta the next time you're headed south. I'd like to see you more often than just four times a year, you know."

"Sure thing, mom." Will hugged his mother and kissed her on the cheek. "I have an appearance to make in Boston the week after next. I'll swing by on the way, I promise."

Erica stood on the toes of her slippered feet to hug him, and he patted her on the back as she did.

"See you up in Maine for Christmas, kiddo. You can email me with your wish list this year."

"Oh, yeah, it'll be just a picture of a BMW," she grinned, and kissed him on the cheek. "Thanks again for the laptop, Uncle Will. You're awesome."

"At least somebody thinks so," Will smiled. "You're welcome, again."

He started walking to the car, and turned around halfway to the driveway.

"Tell your mom and dad I said 'thank you' for the Thanksgiving weekend. I had a good time."

"Will do," Erica beamed. Kate gave him an approving smile, and he returned it with a half-smile of his own, one corner of his mouth pulled up in a reluctant smirk.

Erica and Kate remained on the front steps of the house, like they always did when they saw him off, and waved until he turned the corner at the end of the subdivision and disappeared from their sight.

The drive back was long and boring, and Will's book on CD was finished before he was halfway through Virginia. He tried FM radio, but after scanning through the local stations and finding nothing but country and religious sermons, he turned off the stereo altogether.

He spent the night at a motel in Maryland, checking in at ten in the evening and leaving again at six in the morning. The drive through Pennsylvania and New York was almost as tedious as the first day's drive through Virginia, with the added annoyance of crappy fall weather. When Will finally rolled into Burlington on Sunday evening, he was heartily sick of driving.

Brandywine College was rich and image-conscious, so they put their famous guest speaker up in the Whittington Arms, the finest accommodations Burlington had to offer. The hotel was a pristinely preserved eighteenth-century building in downtown Burlington, complete with wrought-iron lift doors and heavy carpeting everywhere. Will didn't care much for the Victorian-era styling, and he thought the uniformed bellhops looked a bit pretentious, but it beat sleeping in a motel any day of the week, and the place had a very well-stocked bar next to the foyer. He dropped his luggage in his room, prepared his outfit for the morning, and went down to sample the wares at the bar before bedtime.

The speaking assignment was standard college circuit template, one hour of talking followed by two hours of schmoozing with the faculty and the local press. Will shook a lot of hands, smiled into a lot of cameras, and went back to the hotel after lunch with a mild headache. He packed his stuff, switched from the Famous Writer outfit into jeans and sweatshirt, and hightailed it out of Burlington as soon as his obligation to Brandywine allowed.

The drive through New Hampshire and western Maine took another six hours, and when Will pulled into his driveway on Monday evening, he resolved to stay at home and order delivery food for the next week straight.

Back in his own house, having three bathrooms and four bedrooms at his disposal without having to consider anyone else, he considered for the first time that the place was probably too spacious for one person alone. His house easily exceeded the square footage of Bob's place, which was shared by three people. Will could have sheltered Bob, Kate, and Erica, and still have one bedroom to spare for visitors. He had one bedroom set up as his office, but the other two spares were largely empty, used as storage rooms for books and paperwork. It was a new house—he had bought it only three years after it was built when the previous owner sold the place in a divorce—and it was largely unused, built for a family that had never materialized.

Will tossed his dirty clothes into the laundry room, took a shower, and picked up the phone to order a pizza before settling down in his office with a rum & coke. His desk was barren now; the laptop had been the only thing on it. He remembered how cluttered his writing space used to be, back when he had written Crow's Lament and two other novels. Crow's Lament had gone on to be published to raucously positive reviews from all the important critics. The two novels that followed it were collecting dust in his desk drawer, filed away for a second draft edit that had never happened. He still had the original spiral-bound notepads that held the first draft of Crow's Lament, thirty-three of them, stacked in a large cardboard box in the back corner of his office. Back when he had written out the story in torturous longhand, line after line of tightly packed blue ink sentences, his desk had been littered with character biographies, chapter outlines, clippings from magazine articles, and a hundred other snippets that found their way into Crow's Lament in one way or another. Now his desk was empty, covered with a thin film of dust except in one spot where a square outline marked the spot where his laptop had been until last week.

As he was sitting in is office chair, sipping his drink and looking over the contents of his office, it suddenly occurred to him that he had never removed his working files from the old Powerbook before he had handed it to Erica.

"Fabulous," he muttered to himself. Apparently, I don't even care enough about my own writing to keep tabs on my work in progress.

The doorbell rang, and he finished his drink, tossing the glass onto his desk as he got up from his chair.

Brandywine was his last speaking assignment of the year. The rest of Will's schedule looked fairly clear until well past New Year's, with only a book signing in Boston and an interview with a literature magazine left in this calendar year. Both of those fell into the "self-promotion" category and didn't pay anything, but according to Megan, the World's Most Patient Publicist, he had done twenty-five paid speaking appearances since January, which gave Will more than enough leeway for a few non-paying events. Many authors hated book signings with a passion—sitting in a Barnes & Noble for six hours and signing books non-stop—but Will actually liked doing them. The college circuit was full of self-important people, entire liberal arts departments stuffed with pretentiousness both behind the podium and in front of it. Book signings brought out the regular folks, people like Libby who read because they loved his work, not because it was on the syllabus.

The book signing in Boston was in the week following Will's return from Tennessee. It was in a brand new Barnes & Noble right in the middle of downtown, and the Christmas shopping season was in full swing, so the crowds were thicker than usual. The first snow of the season had fallen a few days earlier, and downtown Boston looked cozy, with a blanket of snow serving to enhance the myriad of Christmas lights strung everywhere. Will was in a good mood all through the event, signing books and exchanging niceties with readers. The assistant store manager assigned to the event was a very pretty brunette in her late twenties, and they got along fabulously all evening, joking and talking whenever there was a break in the line. When the signing was over, she extended an unspoken invitation to Will, lingering in his proximity far longer than required by her tasks. He knew that she would take him up on the invitation if he asked her to join him at the bar in his hotel, but for some reason he didn't feel like extending it. The café in the bookstore had done brisk business selling their eggnog coffees, permeating the store with a distinct holiday-like smell, and the whole atmosphere was so festive and pleasant that bedding this pretty bookstore manager at the end of the evening would have felt like despoiling the day for some reason. He let her unspoken invitation pass, and contented himself with a hug and a firm handshake when he said his good-byes.

Amazing, he thought on the walk back to the hotel. Will Liebkind passes on screwing a glory bunny. Next thing you know, there'll be pigs flying about when I open the curtains in the morning.

--

That evening, Claire called.

Will's cell phone rang when he was in the shower, and he cursed all the way from the bathroom to the chair where he had placed his sport coat. He wrapped a towel around himself as he fished the phone out of the inside coat pocket, and glanced at the display to see who was ringing him out of the shower.

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A Bettered Life

Michael Lindgren

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