Temple is emceeing another open mic, this time with fewer rockers and more poets, when Linus hands me the counter phone. I have to bend down to the floor to hear the voice on the other end. I notice the dust motes and coffee grounds lingering beneath the lip of the counter and make a mental note to clean more carefully later.
“Oh, my dear Charlotte.” An old man’s voice, soft and crackly. “How would you like to come and work for me for a while?”
Felix Arneson says, “I’m in New York and Devvie—you remember my assistant, Devvie—has finished her dissertation. She’s leaving me. I’m bereft, but I’ll survive.”
“I don’t…what?” I lean closer to the phone, unsure if I heard correctly. “You want me to work for you? Me?”
Felix chuckles. “I need someone who doesn’t mind the desert, the isolation. It’s fairly boring out there, you know. I mean, there’s a wonderful city nearby, but out where I am, well, you know. You were there! You’d sort my slides, put my files in order. Lots of things, really. Answering the phone, email. Ordering my supplies. It’s room and board and just a little money. What do you say? I think you rather liked it out there.”
I don’t think about it all that long. It hurts here, I’m okay, but it hurts here, and I want to be somewhere quiet, where the ghost of Riley isn’t everywhere.
There was such a stillness in the land around Felix’s house.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I do want to work for you.”
He’ll arrange a ticket for me to New York, where I’ll meet him at his hotel. He promises to take me around when he’s not in the gallery, to museums, to bookstores. Then we’ll fly back together. “I’m afraid to fly,” he whispers. “Isn’t that funny, at my age? I am going to die, after all, but I’m afraid of a little hop across the sky. I’m willing to fly you all the way out here just so I don’t have to fly back by myself.”
I admit that I have never flown in an airplane.
“My goodness, then,” he says. “What a pair we’ll make. And you’ll have that little room, too, to do your own work. Linus tells me you’re working on a kind of book. I can’t wait to hear about it.”
