Page 83 of The Austen Escape
“Yes,” I whispered back.
Dad reached out and covered my hand with his own, just as I had done to him moments before. He didn’t pick it up or squeeze it. He just rested his on top of mine. It was warm and solid and the perfect weight, that reminder that I couldn’t escape unseen. I swiped at my eyes again with my free hand.
“I accepted a job to rewire Mrs. Harris’s new kitchen.”
“Okay...” I choked on a laugh. I had not expected him to follow up with that. “But she’s got to pay you more than a chicken. We talked about this.”
“She is. I printed cards with the pricing schedule you designed and she accepted it. I standardized the whole thing like you suggested. But I wondered... What would you think if I invited her out to dinner sometime?”
“You’re asking Mrs. Harris on a date?” I heard my tone. It was almost offensive in the amount of surprise that rippled through it.
I sat up, faced him, and tried again—this time as a sentence, and I smiled as I said it. “You’re asking Mrs. Harris out on a date.”
Dad kept his eyes trained on the sky. “I don’t know that I’d call it a date, but I care about her. She and I have gotten to talking over the past several months, and I’m thinking dinner is a good start—dinner and maybe a movie. Maybe that’s too much for one night?”
“I think you could squeeze it in.”
“Perhaps I’ll take her to La Buona Vita in LaGrange. We went there for your birthday a few years ago, remember?” He slid me a glance. “Isabel ordered that huge cake with the sparklers.”
Isabel. She’d seen my dad, my “relational” dad, as she’d called him, better than I had.
“I remember.”
“It’s a little fancier than what I was thinking for a first date, but the drive will be lovely this time of year.”
I leaned back and watched the music. “I agree, Dad. Do that first and save the movie for your second date.”
Dad’s machine doled out a bag of Skittles every two hours. I let several drop before I circled back each time and swiped the colored rainbow from the catch bowl.
After the third bag, I stood in the center of my studio apartment and surveyed the scene. From the living room, one 360-degree turn exposed every square foot of my home except the shower, which resided behind the bathroom door. The kitchen had been stripped of all superfluous stuff—perishables I couldn’t eat, nonperishables I wouldn’t, and redundancies. I refused to pack and move six strainers or twenty-seven empty Mason jars.
I’d hesitated over the jars. My old piano teacher sent me three jars of jam every August. The day they arrived always felt like my birthday, and I practically licked each jar clean—all the while pushing aside, and yet cosseting, that little nudge, that pinprick, of the something lost that they evoked.
It was always the music. I could now name it and enjoy it. After my dinner with Dad, I’d driven home and pulled my Lanvin shoe box from the top of my closet. I had also pulled the last jam jar from the fridge, sat on the floor, and thrashed a spoon around its farthest edges. It was delicious.
I turned again. The bedroom was set. Books on the bedside table straightened and every drawer cleared out. The living room, the bathroom, and the small alcove that served as my office—one desk and one chair—were cleared of every broken pencil, every leaky or dry pen, every unnecessary scrap of paper. Three garbage bags and four boxes for Goodwill. Two bags for the Dumpster.
Six hours to clean an apartment. Six hours to ready it to move across the country. Six hours to ponder Dad’s question.
Are you running?
Nathan had asked the same question.Do you ever feel like running away?Isabel had asked it too—Isabel had lived it. Are we always between moments of running away?
Are you running?
I answered the question.Not enough.
I grabbed a pair of shorts and my San Antonio Marathon T-shirt from the perfectly organized drawer, changed quickly, and headed to the Town Lake Trail, my usual route along Lake Austin—which was really a renamed section of the Colorado River. I turned south on Exposition Boulevard, relishing the burn of every hill, and dropped down onto Lake Austin Boulevard to pick up the Town Lake Trail under MoPac.
I passed the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue.Single-handedly revived blues in the 1980s.Dad loved that statue and always gave it a salute when we passed. I wondered if Nathan had seen it. He’d love it... I ran on.
I cut back over the river on the Congress Avenue bridge, right over those two million bats. They, too, would be moving soon. They’d head south to Mexico City; I’d travel north to Boston.
It felt as if everyone and everything was on the move. Gertrude. Nathan. WATT. Dad. Time was not static.
I stalled at the end of the bridge. Large white canvas umbrellas covered the patio at the Four Seasons Hotel. They reminded me of Braithwaite House. It felt very close and, in the same breath, a lifetime ago.
And that’s when they flew. I looked up as almost two million bats rose into the sky. They came out in waves, an undulating pattern rather than a steady stream. It made me think of Golightly and the power problem. It made me think of WATT: all theseindividual bats working at the same time, in the same direction. A surge of them rose in the air so tightly I couldn’t make out the individuals; it was just a mass of black.
