The Nearness of You Page 7

  Clive Negly wasn’t much to look at. His department store suit, complete with bow tie, hung awkwardly on his thin frame, like he was a boy playing dress-up, parading around in his father’s wardrobe. A prominent Adam’s apple, dimpled cheeks, and a smattering of acne at the corner of his mouth didn’t do him any favors, either. Oddly enough, Clive’s strawberry-blond hair was already thinning on top, not the least bit disguised by his rather severe attempt at a comb-over; Boone would’ve bet the kid would be bald as a cue ball by the time he was thirty.

  But as out of sorts as the young writer’s appearance was, his social skills were even worse. He stood too close, talked too loud, and stayed too long. Scuttlebutt around the office was to never get pinned in a corner by Clive because you’d never get back out. Questions left his mouth like machine-gun fire. To the kid’s credit, Boone had heard he was talented with the typewriter, capable of finding angles that hadn’t been explored and writing about them. Still, Boone had been thankful to have avoided working with Clive.

  Until now, that is.

  “Give me those,” Boone said, pointing at Clive’s luggage. He popped the trunk of the Chrysler and frowned. Even though he’d brought hardly anything of his own, there still wasn’t a lot of room on account of the odds and ends he’d been hauling around for years. He snatched up the writer’s bags and tossed them in; the first two fit fine but the third didn’t want to cooperate.

  “Be careful with those,” Clive said. “They’re handmade, crafted from the finest leather. My parents gave them to me as a graduation gift.”

  “Sure, sure,” Boone said, wedging the suitcase in even harder.

  “Why not just put it in the backseat?”

  “’Cause that’s where Daisy’s sitting,” Boone answered, turning the bag this way and that, growing frustrated that it still wouldn’t fit.

  “Daisy?” the writer echoed. “Walter didn’t tell me someone else was coming along.” He stooped to look in the rear windows. “Wait…is that a dog…?”

  Holding the luggage at just the right angle, Boone grabbed the trunk lid with his free hand and slammed it shut in one fast motion. He suspected that Clive’s suitcase was a little crunched, but at least the lid stayed shut. “Good powers of observation you got there, pal,” he answered.

  “No, no, no,” Clive said as he shook his head, his arms folded across his chest. “That animal isn’t going with us to Hooper’s Crossing.”

  “The heck she isn’t,” Boone disagreed. “You’ll stay behind before she does.”

  Clive’s look of defiance faltered, quickly turning into something that resembled pleading. “But you don’t understand,” he said. “I can’t ride with her.”

  “Why not?” Boone asked.

  “Because I’m allergic to dogs.”

  “How so?”

  “Anytime I’m around them,” Clive explained, “I break out in hives, I can’t stop itching, my nose runs and my eyes water, to say nothing of the…of the…of the…” While he stuttered along, the writer’s face got all screwed up, his nose twitched, and his mouth fell open before he finally let loose a titanic sneeze, spraying the sidewalk; a woman who’d been walking past raised the lapel of her coat to her face and hurried away. “The sneezing…” Clive finished, although it was hardly necessary.

  “It can’t be that bad,” Boone said, unmoved and unconvinced.

  “It’s been like this since I was a kid,” Clive replied. “Whenever I’m around a dog, I can’t seem to stop myself from—” Before he could say more, he was overcome by a series of violent sneezes that shook his paltry frame. Boone didn’t know if the man was as allergic as he claimed, or if it was all in his head and the sight of a dog set him off. In the end, he decided that it didn’t matter. It was bad enough that he’d been given this assignment in the first place. He wasn’t leaving Daisy behind.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Boone said.

  “But I won’t,” Clive insisted, sounding sort of whiny.

  “Then ride with the window down. The fresh air will do you good.”

  “For ten hours?” the writer blurted. “By the time we get there, both of us will have caught our death from cold!”

  “No, we won’t. This girl’s got one hell of a heater,” Boone replied, giving the Chrysler’s roof a pat for good measure. “C’mon. Don’t be a baby.”

  Clive’s frown deepened. “Maybe we should go inside and call Walter…”

  Boone’s jaw clenched. He was starting to get angry. For a moment, he thought about lighting into Clive, maybe even tossing the writer into the car himself. It wasn’t like the scarecrow of a man could put up much of a fight. But then he thought of another tack he could take.

  “You want to be a writer, don’t you?” Boone asked.

  “Of course,” Clive replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “I mean, you want to make a career for yourself with Life magazine,” he clarified. “Trotting around the world. Writing important articles.”

  A big smile opened on the young man’s face. “I do,” Clive insisted. “It’s what I’ve been working for my whole life.”

  “So what happens if you’re in the war-torn streets of Berlin or some Mexican village just after a hurricane and a dog trots over to say howdy?” Boone asked. “Or what if it isn’t a dog but some sniper shooting from a wrecked bell tower or a fire in a factory? Are you going to let an obstacle stand in your way or are you going to go get that story no matter what?” He remembered what Walter had told him, about how he should mentor Clive, let a little of his experience rub off on the kid. “I’ve been there, you know, when things don’t go the way you planned. All I’ve gotten as a photographer, all the praise and bylines, happened because I didn’t let the little things hold me back.”

  From the look on Clive’s face, it seemed as if Boone had managed to push the correct buttons. “You’re right,” he said, nodding his head. “If I want to become a famous writer, I can’t let an allergy keep me from my story.” He yanked open the passenger’s door. “Let’s go!”

  “Thank God,” Boone muttered under his breath.

  But by the time he’d put the key in the ignition, a jazz tune on the radio beating along in perfect time with the sound of Daisy’s tail thumping against the upholstery, Clive was already sneezing.

  “Roll down the window,” Boone told him.

  The writer did as he’d been told, but his allergy showed no signs of slowing. “I’ll be…I’ll be fine…” Clive claimed, then went right back to sneezing. “This…this is going to be the…be the…” Another sneeze. “…best trip ever…”

  Boone had plenty of doubts about that dubious claim. As a matter of fact, they hadn’t left the curb and he was already exhausted.

  Boone drove them north and out of the city, crossing the Hudson River as the crowded metropolitan center gave way, slowly at first, to rolling fields and woods thick with trees, their leaves the bright red and orange of autumn. They passed through a steady stream of towns, Highland Mills, Mountainville, Newburgh, and on and on. And with every mile that they drove, Boone learned the hard way that the rumors about Clive were true.

  He never shut up. Ever.

  In the couple of hours that they’d been on the road, Boone had learned that Clive had grown up in Salisbury, Maryland, only twenty minutes from the ocean; that he’d been the youngest child and only boy among six sisters; that he had swung hard at the first baseball pitch he’d ever seen, nicked the ball and fouled it back, breaking his nose, causing him to never play the game again; that Clive thought Faulkner was overrated as a writer; that the perfume Chloe wore in the office made him sneeze even harder than when he was around dogs; that his upstairs neighbor played his records too loud; and a good two dozen other useless tidbits that Boone had struggled to tune out, staring at the road and squeezing the steering wheel ever tighter.

  The worst part was that Clive had carried on his monologue through a series of sneezes. Even with the cold wind blasting
through his open window, his allergies never relented. Water streamed from the corners of the writer’s eyes and he’d blown his nose in his handkerchief with such force that it sounded like an elephant’s trumpet. Unfortunately for Boone, none of this silenced Clive’s tongue. Occasionally, Boone snuck looks in the rearview mirror at the source of his passenger’s irritation, but Daisy was peacefully dozing away, chasing a ball in her dreams, completely unaware of the chaos she was causing.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Clive abruptly asked.

  “What?” Boone blurted, yanked out of the trance he’d been in.

  “I asked if you…if you…” Another sneeze. “…had a girlfriend.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Huh…” Clive responded. “That’s surprising.”

  Boone looked at the writer. “What makes you say that?” he asked.

  “I would’ve thought that a guy like you, good looking and with a job that takes him all around the world, would have women flocking to him like chickens at…at…at…” Another sneeze. “…feeding time. The second you said ‘Daisy’ back on the sidewalk, I expected to find some voluptuous brunette in the backseat, checking her lipstick in a…in a…” Sneeze. “…compact or looking at me through stylish sunglasses like the Hollywood vixens wear. Quite frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me that you’re single.”

  Staring at the road stretching out before them, Boone didn’t answer. The truth was, it didn’t make a lot of sense to him, either. There were women in his life and it was largely on account of his work. He had sipped sake with a cute Japanese girl in Kyoto. He’d kissed a California blonde on a beach beneath a sliver of a moon. He had danced the tango with a brown-skinned beauty in Madrid. But none of these romances had lasted. Each was a brief moment that had burned bright and hot before it went out. The demands of being a professional photographer always kept him on the move, leaving little time for dinners by candlelight, dates at the movies or a ballgame, love letters, whispered phone conversations, or tearful good-byes at the train station.

  His parents hadn’t provided much of an example for him to go by. Boone’s mother and father had always seemed to be married more to the Lord than each other. All through his childhood, they’d dragged him to and from church, traveled around the countryside sermonizing from door to door, and even stood on street corners holding signs announcing the upcoming return of the Savior. Nights weren’t wasted listening to the radio or talking around the fire but were to be spent reading the Bible and lecturing their only child about the dangers lurking outside their door. Their warnings had clearly fallen on deaf ears, for as soon as Boone was able, he’d left his folks behind and moved to the city, more than a little curious about what was really out there in the larger world.

  If he found love one day, Boone was confident that it wouldn’t look anything like what he’d known growing up.

  But what it would look like was anyone’s guess.

  “So what about you?” Boone asked Clive. “You got a lady?”

  The writer sneezed twice, then wiped his dripping nose with his handkerchief. “Mandy Pitlor,” he said. “She’s the girl of my dreams.”

  “Does she live in the city?”

  “No,” Clive answered. “Mandy’s back in Maryland where we grew up.”

  Boone nodded. “A long-distance thing, huh?”

  “Sort of. She’s…she’s…” Sneeze. “…married with a couple of kids.”

  The car swerved slightly as Boone struggled to contain his surprise. “I thought you said she was your gal!”

  “I wanted her to be,” Clive said. “She lived down the street from me when we were growing up and I always…always…” Sneeze. “…thought we’d end up together, but I never got up the nerve to ask her out, so…so…” Yet another wrenching sneeze. “…Sam Donovan beat me to the punch.”

  Somehow Boone held his tongue. His first instinct was to tell Clive that if you wanted something bad enough, you had to go get it. Nothing was just going to fall in your lap. Just that morning, he had taken a risk by sneaking over the fence to snap a picture of the Manhattan skyline, and while things hadn’t worked out like he had planned, at least he’d tried. Fortune favored the bold. But then Boone thought better of it. What good would it do to give the guy grief? Clive would either figure it out one day or he wouldn’t. It was as simple as that.

  “I bet you don’t have any problem with girls,” the young writer said.

  “I do fine,” Boone admitted. “Job makes it tough.”

  Clive frowned. “I’d think it would be the opposite. All those glamorous places and pretty faces from around the world.” His face suddenly lit up as if he’d had a brilliant idea. “As a matter of fact, I bet you manage to meet someone while we’re in Hooper’s Crossing.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  The writer dug around in his back pocket before finally pulling out his wallet. He yanked out a bill, holding it tight on account of the wind whipping in the open window. “I’ve got five bucks that says you at least get a kiss.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boone said. “You’re willing to bet money on me mashing with some broad?”

  “Why not?”

  Boone knew that Clive was just trying to bond with him, to come up with something that would bring the two of them a little closer. But the more he thought about it, the more he saw it as a win-win situation. Either he got a kiss from some cute number, which would only set him back a fiver, or he got a little extra padding for his pocket. After all, another Mycro cost money, and every bit helped.

  “All right,” he said. “You’re on.”

  “Four days is plenty of time for you…you…” Sneeze. “…to come through.”

  Once again, Boone didn’t answer. He hadn’t broken it to Clive that Walter’s plan for them to be in Hoover’s Crossing for four days, snapping pictures of some ridiculous fall festival, wasn’t going to happen.

  If he had it his way, they wouldn’t be there for more than one night.

  But who knew? Maybe that was still enough time for a kiss.

  Chapter Seven

  SHORTLY AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK, Lily slipped her key into the library’s front door and turned the lock, another workday done. Her afternoon had been much like her morning. Between checking out books, helping people find what they were looking for, and answering the telephone, she’d continued to search the card catalog for mistakes; by the time the boring task was finished, she had found a grand total of six. Every time Ethel appeared between the stacks, she frowned at Lily, acting as if her younger colleague was doing something wrong or lazing about. Finally, the clock had wound its way to closing time and Ethel had hurried out the door, leaving Lily to finish up.

  Just like she does almost every other day…

  Not that Lily was in a big hurry to get home. Tomorrow was the day of her father’s big speech opening the fall festival, which meant that Lily was going to have to sit through more practicing as Morris nitpicked every detail, trying out inflections and hand gestures, changing a word here and there, all while driving his daughter completely out of her—

  The sudden honk of a car’s horn startled Lily so badly that she dropped her keys. She spun around to find Garrett Doyle smiling sheepishly as he leaned out the window of his police car.

  “Looks like I’m making a habit out of scaring you,” he said.

  “It most certainly does,” Lily replied as she bent to retrieve her keys, thinking about how badly she’d jumped the night before when Garrett surprised her outside her house, the command of his voice and the glare of his flashlight making her heart race.

  “Would you believe me if I told you it wasn’t on purpose?”

  “Probably not,” Lily told him, although she was smiling as she walked toward his car. “Is your shift just starting or are you done for the day?”

  “Neither,” Garrett answered. “I’m supposed to be on my dinner break but I’ve been too busy to take it. When I saw what time it was, I thought I
’d swing by and see if you wanted a ride home. With the way I startled you last night, I figured it was the least I could do.”

  “But then you end up frightening me all over again.”

  He laughed easily. “Like I said, it’s becoming a habit. So how about it? You want a lift?”

  “Sure,” Lily said, then opened the passenger’s door, thankful that she wouldn’t have to walk home and for a little friendly company.

  But once she was inside, Garrett whipped a U-turn in the middle of the street and headed in the opposite direction from where they lived.

  “Didn’t you say you were taking me home?” Lily asked. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the way.”

  “I have to run a quick errand first,” he explained, then patted the seat between them, jostling a small paper sack stained with a smattering of grease spots. “Louise Hickman flagged me down when I was going past her house and asked if I’d mind taking her husband his dinner. Ken’s working at the festival grounds and forgot it on the way out the door. It’ll just take a minute.”

  “Is this why you’re too busy to eat?”

  “It’s no big deal,” Garrett answered with a shrug. “Besides, the Hickmans are good people. Last Fourth of July, Louise left a plate of barbecue sandwiches in her mailbox for all the police officers who had to work. It was one heck of a nice snack in the middle of the night, that was for sure.”

  For the rest of their short drive to the park, they chatted about their respective days. Garrett told her about some of the goings-on around town, all the new faces he’d seen, as well as the blown tire of a delivery truck out on Route 5. But when it was Lily’s turn, she chose not to be as forthcoming. Like Jane, it wasn’t as if Garrett didn’t know from experience how grouchy Ethel Wilkinson could be. But Lily didn’t want to sound like she was complaining, so she held her tongue.

  Garrett pulled to the curb beside City Park. Out her window, Lily watched what seemed like half the town working on the festival. Even in the short time since she’d last seen it, the night before when she and Jane had driven past, things had changed. The booths looked ready to open for business. The strings of lights in the trees shone as the bulbs were inspected. Bunting hung along the stage on which her father would give his speech. The air was filled with the strange symphony of hammers and saws, shouts and laughter.