1 Chapter 1

The grant letter came to the house a week or so before Memorial Day. I’d just finished posting the last of my grades and tried to convince myself that I wasn’t nervous about my decision to take the summer off. Lee told me, “You can’t work all the damn time, Curt.” He had a point, but we couldn’t really afford for me to take a semester’s break if the grant didn’t come through.

So the letter came just in time, on the day of the department convocation and my last day at work until the fall. I spent the afternoon on campus with the other professors in the Richmond College English Department, dressed in black scholarly robes and laughing over what our students had written on our teacher evaluation forms. We pulled ourselves together long enough to look studious for the convocation ceremony, but I managed to slip away from the reception afterward because I was more than ready to put the spring semester behind me. I told the dean my old standby excuse—Lee was on hospital duty this week and I had to get home to wake him up before his shift. Never mind that he was working days at the clinic—by that time I’d had my fill of the graduation festivities and just wanted to go home. With a sympathetic nod, the dean said she understood.

As I turned to leave, though, she stopped me with a carefully worded question. “You know the recipient letters went out Monday, right?”

Monday. Three days before the convocation and I hadn’t received one yet. Three days…at the end of March I had submitted the first of a novel I began earlier in the year but maybe it hadn’t been good enough and I wasn’t getting the grant. I took the summer off specifically to work on the book, sure that I’d have the grant money to make up for the lack of a paycheck, but three days was an eternity…my heart hammered and I was quite sure that Ellen Hoyle, dean of the College of Arts, could hear it from where she stood with that enigmatic look on her face. Smirk or smile, I couldn’t tell which.

My drive home was a blur, with me alternating between gassing my aging Corolla to spurting ahead in anticipation and tapping the brakes in fear of what I might find in the mailbox. Nothing, that would be the worst. Nothing but bills and maybe a postcard from my mother up in Atlantic City, a few grocery store ads.

Pulling into the driveway, I noticed that the mail had arrived. I didn’t even make it all the way into the garage. Once out of the car I skirted Lee’s azaleas, took the porch steps two at a time, snatched the mail from the box. I had the same breathless excitement I felt years ago when the letter came from Richard College welcoming me to the faculty. I riffled through the envelopes. Bills mostly, I called that one, but at the bottom of the stack, right up against the advertising circular, I saw the school seal and my heart skipped. This is it,I thought, staring at my name typed in all uppercase letters. Curtis C. Schrivner

Somehow I fumbled my key into the lock and got the door open, but I didn’t bother to shut it behind me. In the hallway I dropped the rest of the mail on the last step of the staircase. I kept the envelope with my name on it, the grant letter, in my trembling hand. I wanted to tear it open but was afraid of what I’d find inside. Yes, no, what? I didn’t want to read the letter so much as I wished I already knew what it said.

I wanted Lee with me.

The phone sat on a small table in the hall and I snatched up the receiver and punched in the number for the clinic. A ring, two, before an automated system clicked on, an emotionless woman’s voice droning. “Thank you for calling Riverside Immediate Care Clinic, located on—”

I hit zero for the operator and waited. The phone began to ring again, longer this time, four rings, five. “Come on,” I breathed, turning the envelope over in my hands. My thumb was already easing beneath the flap but I stopped myself. I wanted to share this with Lee, whatever the letter said. He’d want to know.

Finally a live person answered…or rather, as live as they got down there this late in the afternoon. “Help you?” she asked. I pictured a bored nurse, phone wedged between her shoulder and ear as she filed her fingernails.

The flap tore and I stopped picking at it. “Dr. Gui, please.”

“I’m sorry.” She sounded anything but. “He’s busy at the moment. If I could have your name…”

A new girl,I thought. Most of the nurses who work with Lee knew when I was on the phone and patched me right through to his office. “This is important,” I told her. My fingers picked at the torn envelope flap with a dogged determination. “Tell him it’s Curt. He’ll know—”

“He’s in with a patient at the moment,” the nurse said. “I can take a message—”

My response came out harsher than I intended. “You can tell him Curt’s on the line,” I said and in my hands the corner of the envelope tore completely off. Before she could argue, I added, “He’ll take the call. I’ll hold.”

No answer that time, just a frustrated growl and then Celine Dion started to croon in my ear as I was put on hold. I held long enough to hear the end of the song as well as a traffic report and a run of commercials for furniture stores and used car lots and the weekly specials at the grocery down the street.

I kept smoothing down the flap of the envelope because my fingers insisted on picking at it. I’d have the damn thing open before Lee ever answered the phone. I began to wonder if maybe Ms. Snit didn’t just park me on infinite hold. Maybe she had no intention of even telling Lee I was on the phone for him. A new song played in my ear and I told myself if I was still on hold by the time it ended, I’d hang up and call back again—

The music cut off abruptly, replace by my lover’s brusque voice. “Curt?” he asked.