Chapter Eighty-Six
She tracks them to the kids’ section of the store, and she has a knot in the pit of her stomach—the feeling every mother knows when they witness their child in peril—as she watches her son standing on a stool trying to reach a book displayed on one of the higher shelves.
“George Giuseppe Riley!” she bellows. “You get down from there!”
George’s little sister Clare, who’s obviously egged him on, comes to his defense. “It’s the book Daddy reads to us.”
Jules lifts George up by the arm, lowers him to the floor. He managed to grab the book—Where the Wild Things Are—and he and his sister are now in a conga line chanting Ooo-ca-chuck-a-waca, Ooo-ca-chuck-a-waca, like the wild things they are.
They stop only when they see their aunties admiring the chaos.
Jules turns to Lucy and Carrie, says, “Did you really need to give them candy and ice cream?”
Carrie holds up her hands, distancing herself. “Don’t blame me. Your parents…”
“Can you blame them?” Lucy says. “They’re so fucking cute.”
“Where are my parents?” Jules asks.
“They went to save us all seats. There’s already a big crowd,” Carrie says, looking over at the packed area in the back of the bookstore where the signing will be held.
Jules scans the room. It is a packed house. On the stage is a large poster of Quinn and the cover of his latest novel, The Hill of Infinity, which was released last week and is already on the Times list.
“I told them, his publicist reserved some chairs up front for us,” Jules says, doing her best to keep a grip on the kids’ hands now.
“Publicist,” Lucy says. “Fancy.”
“I’m going to go wish him luck. Would you mind taking the sugar twins over to my parents and making sure they don’t hurt themselves or others?”
“We’ve got it,” Carrie says.
Lucy and Carrie each hold one of George’s hands as he swings himself in the air.
Her daughter Clare—who looks shockingly like her namesake, Jules’s sister—is still doing the Wild Things walk, ice cream smeared on her cheeks.
Jules has a momentary sting in her chest at the memory of her sister around the same age with chocolate all over her face, denying she ate Jules’s candy bar.
She finds her way to the small green room. Quinn’s publicist, a woman in her twenties who is surprisingly militant in managing Jules’s husband, opens the door for her. “Tell him five minutes.”
She finds Quinn sitting at a table reading a book like he doesn’t have a care in the world. She studies him a long time. It’s as if he pours every heartache he ever felt, every loss—and every joy—into his work. She’s so proud of him.
“Remember to smile,” she says.
“I will,” he says, exasperated. He stands, faces her.
“And remember it’s called a book talk so you need to talk—no one-word answers to the interviewer’s questions,” she says, straightening his shirt collar.
“Yes,” he deadpans. “Speaking of, when they open it up for audience questions, you’ve told the kids it’s not their time to ask questions?” he asks.
She smiles. “I’ll do my best.”
“I saw your mom and dad. It was nice of them to come,” he says. “You asked them to take the kids tonight so we can celebrate properly?” He cocks a brow.
He still makes her blush. “We’ll see how you do with the book talk…”
The publicist pops her head in. “One minute.” She’s holding one of those new iPad things like a clipboard.
“I’d better take my seat.” Jules kisses him again, then wipes the lipstick mark with her thumb. At the door she turns, says, “Quinn Riley. Your parents would be so proud of you.”
“All that matters is that you are.”
He looks at her in that way he does. And she feels loved and brave and strong.
At the end of the event, Quinn sits facing the bookseller, who asked gushing questions for the last forty minutes.
The signing seems to be going well. The crowd even laughed a few times at his responses to some of the questions.
It’s a surreal experience having so many people invested in his words.
Seeing so many friends in the packed house.
Minnie Agbayani is twenty-two years old and graduating from college, and she and her father brought Quinn a bouquet of flowers.
Toby now owns fourteen Burger Huts and sits with his beautiful wife, proving he finally did get a girlfriend.
The boys from Midwest Investigators. Even Randy Calhoon, a free man now, who probably hasn’t read a book in his life, came.
The bookseller announces it’s time for audience questions.
Two small hands fly into the air from the front row. “Ooo, ooo, I have one, I have one,” Quinn’s son George says.
“Me too!” Clare says in her tiny voice.
Jules is trying to pull down their flailing hands, but Quinn shakes his head.
“If you’ll indulge me,” Quinn says to the audience, “my children have questions.”
The crowd laughs.
“Yes, George.”
George suddenly freezes.
“Stage fright?” Quinn says to his son. “I’ve been there.”
The audience laughs again.
Then his sister jumps in: “He wants to know if the book has dinosaurs in it?”
More laughter fills the store.
“Not this time. But maybe the sequel.”
As Jules is giving the kids a stern lecture, other members of the audience line up at the microphone stationed at the side.
A woman in her twenties holds Quinn’s novel at her chest, leans into the microphone.
“Your book, I wept, I still can’t stop thinking about it.
” She seems to be holding back tears. Referring to the characters in the novel, she asks, “When Jessica reads the letters he wrote her when he was at war. I have to ask. Is Jessica based on a real person?”
Before Quinn gives the stock answer that the novel is a pure work of fiction, he exchanges a glance with the beautiful woman corralling his children, and for the briefest of moments he’s back at study hall in 1992 when they found each other.
And he finally feels full and happy and that he belongs in this world.