Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Mo
The car wasn’t as fancy as Mo had imagined.
It was a midsized Honda Civic. Newish, sure, but very much a dad car.
The man driving the car didn’t look like a dad, though.
He was Mo’s age, with wild brown hair twisting in an untidy nest above his broad forehead.
He had a thick build, with shoulders like a breadboard, and wore a white ribbed sweater.
Before they pulled off the curb, he raised his sunglasses to check his mirrors.
“Thanks for the ride,” Mo said as she buckled her seat belt.
“You’re welcome for the ride,” he said. “I’m Wes, by the way.”
“Mo,” she said. “Which you probably know. Sorry, I’m just nervous.”
She pulled out her phone and texted Mackenzie.
Reminder to feed and adore Perkins while I’m gone.
Perkins was her hedgehog, and he was extremely nocturnal and snuffly and generally all the good things to expect in a hedgehog.
He’d been an impulse-adopt from a Facebook posting soon after she moved to the city.
Someone’s kid had not understood how much work pet ownership was, and she had gotten him very cheap.
All Mo wanted was a big, slobbery dog to cuddle with at night, but the lease agreement plus their work schedules could not handle that.
Instead, Mo had taken on the opposite of cuddly with Perkins.
In response, Mackenzie texted a picture of him. He was, as expected, sleeping in an adorable ball.
“Is that a rat?” Wes asked, his sunglasses directed squarely at her phone screen.
Her mind skidded suddenly to the rat and the rose peeking out from the garbage can. Her driver probably didn’t want to hear her ratport. “I don’t want to distract you.”
He gestured at the stopped traffic around them.
“It’s a hedgehog. His name is Perkins.”
He snorted. “Like Clive’s friend Perkins?”
Of course, as the estate’s representative, Wes would know everything about the book.
In the novel, Lieutenant Samuel Perkins and his wife Charlotte came over for a dinner party, which served as the climax of the book, where Eliza first lost control of her temper.
Morgan described Perkins as having a long nose and pinched face, and once Mo saw her hedgehog, well—sometimes a name stuck.
Traffic finally moved again, and the Bronx slid past at a pace a little faster than walking.
As they crawled, she toyed with the name Wes in her head, flipping it here and there.
Something about him pinged in her, like they’d met before, but she couldn’t place him.
Then, finally, it clicked. She glanced sideways at his profile, then typed into her phone.
She searched for his name and found him instantly on LinkedIn.
Wesley Spencer was a literary agent, and on LinkedIn he wrote about trends and pointed out publishing scams. He also spoke openly about being a bisexual man in the publishing world and the need for more and better representation.
Mo had been following him for a few years, in fact, along with his other half a million followers.
With his LinkedIn headshot in front of her, she had to admit he was more handsome in person.
His mouth was nice, Mo noticed. He had perfectly symmetrical lips, something she hadn’t realized other lips lacked before.
It was easier to look at his lips, since his eyes were obscured.
Covered or not, Mo could still see his eyebrow jutting up above the sunglasses.
She looked away before she made it obvious, but she felt him glance over at her, curious.
At a stoplight, Wes asked, “Do you think Perkins is gay coded?”
“My hedgehog?” Maureen had never considered her hedgehog’s preferences before. Then what Wes meant registered with her. “Oh, in P&L ? I’ve never really thought about it.”
Wes hmm -ed. “I’ve always thought of Clive and Perkins as a did-they-or-didn’t-they thing,” he said, then ran a hand through his hair. Somehow, despite the sunglasses, it seemed to be falling in his eyes.
“I never really read Clive as gay,” Mo admitted.
“He’s bi,” Wes said with surety.
“Like you.” Mo froze, embarrassed. “I mean, I know from the internet. From you posting about being bi.”
Wes laughed. The sunglasses came off and he glanced toward her, waving an SUV in to merge. “So you know me? Threads or BlueSky?”
Every pubescent horror or gaff in front of a class had been erased to crown this moment. “I follow you on LinkedIn.”
He laughed. “We can make that a formal connection after this weekend,” he said.
The word connection snagged her brain. The sound of the word with neck in it, said from his perfect mouth, made hers get warm. “Should we listen to something?” Mo asked, changing the subject.
“Should I trust you with the aux?”
“Hey, I have very good aux sense.”
“Fine.”
Mo scrolled through her phone. She couldn’t read him, but she didn’t want to put on something he hated either. “How about aughts alternative?”
“How alternative?”
Instead of answering, Mo started the playlist. She wasn’t going to give him a doctoral thesis on her music curation. She started with the New Pornographers, then led into Matt and Kim, transitioning into Tilly and the Wall.
“Interesting percussion,” he commented.
“Live tap dancer. Their concerts were amazing.”
When he didn’t complain about the first few songs, she settled in and looked out of the window at the passing scenery.
New York had slipped behind them. More comfortable with her music behind her, she said, “The Clive/Perkins discussion reminds me of the Frodo/Sam headcanon in Lord of the Rings . I never really considered them as a couple until I started reading fanfic.”
Wes glanced at her. “Read much LOTR fanfic?”
She was not going to tell this stranger, this big-deal agent, this possible LinkedIn connection that she had written fanfic, and that Sam had been her crush since—forever.
“Some. But after I started reading more of it, I couldn’t watch the movies in the same way.
It really was the most tender relationship in the films, and there was something more than friendship there. ”
“We agree on that. So can’t you see how that scene in P&L …
” He tapped the steering wheel, nervous energy thrumming through him.
“You know the scene I’m thinking of. That level look they give each other over the dinner table.
Clive and Perkins, I mean. The way Morgan describes Clive writing the letter to Perkins, the way he labors over it. ”
“I always thought that was because of their shared war trauma, the way they didn’t get a chance to fully have an adolescence, and so when he, you know, joins the party scene a bit later than everyone else, he never fits in there.
But he never fit in with his unit either,” Mo said, working things through aloud.
It was surreal to be having a deeply literary conversation in the car, with a hedgehog starting it all.
In Maureen’s retelling, Clive was a man who saw people as stepping stones.
People were valued based on their utility to him, and if those people dared to step outside of those norms, well—consequences.
It was only too easy to recast him in the modern day as a Wall Street bro.
Yes, he partied, but then again, how could he not want the familiar world order that supported him, making as much money as he could and having a traditional family to boost his image as he earned it?
After a moment, she cleared her throat. “I could see a Perkins-and-Clive thing. The way Clive touches his jacket in the hallway. I always read that as acknowledging the medals of valor they shared, but the intimacy is something.”
“Exactly,” Wes said. He tapped the steering wheel and looked over at her. “It’s nice to talk about the novel with another fan.”
“I’m guessing, as the estate rep, you get to do that a lot,” Mo said.
“Not with another writer.”
“You write too?”
He gave her a look. “Yeah.” He seemed to be about to say more, but instead he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of “Read My Mind” by the Killers.
Was she supposed to know his writing? All she knew about him was his emblematic and usually funny posts on a social media site usually designed for cringing your way through the job market.
The buzzing of her phone conveniently drew her attention away from him.
A text from her sister, Anna, with a link to the proofs of her wedding invitations.
For the moment, Mo put that text aside and opened one with Sloan. She couldn’t easily Google Wes in any depth from the car, but her roommate was a regular internet sleuth. Who is Wesley Spencer? she texted.
Wes didn’t seem to notice the pause in conversation.
I-95 N was heavy with traffic, but at least it moved.
The Civic hummed along and rain tinked lightly on the windshield, barely a drizzle.
It couldn’t seem to decide whether it wanted to be there or not.
While waiting for Sloan to text back, Mo clicked on and reviewed her sister’s wedding invites.
They were perfect, much like her sister.
She sent back a heart emoji. By the time she looked up again, they were in Connecticut.
Mo hadn’t had any reason to visit Connecticut before. She had friends in Baychester and Harlem and Roslyn Heights, but not Greenwich . Even its pronunciation seemed like it would cost you money to say it.
Wes went through a tollbooth, slow enough to ensure the E-ZPass scanned.
She watched his hands on the steering wheel, trying not to be obvious she was watching him.
Observation was an important part of being a writer.
He had nice arms under that shirt and shoulders that could support a wall.
That wasn’t exactly the stuff of Alice Munro, but it was something.
Suddenly, Wes glanced out his side window, then back at the road. Calmly, he said, “The bridge collapsed.”