I know you hate it when I meddle, and I know you like Latin, but you’re simply not putting the time into your other classes. The headmistress said something about peer tutors, which I think sounds like a cop-out. We can find you a proper tutor. It’s ok to ask for help when you need it.
She read over the text and then deleted it. Shy did hate it when she meddled. Her most meddlesome had been her excitement about the move itself, which Shy had found simply annoying. “What color do you want your new room to be?” Wendy would ask. “I honestly don’t care, Mum,” Shy would answer. “Should we give away all our old clothes and just get new ones when we get there?” Wendy would ask gleefully. “Why would we do that?” Shy said. “Should we put in one of those taps by the stove in our new kitchen so we can fill up pots for pasta?” Shy didn’t even bother responding to that. Should she text Roy? Maybe Shy was in the wrong school. But Roy might be writing. Wendy didn’t want to disturb him.
She turned back to her computer and dragged the cursor away from the perfume article and into the search engine. Maybe if she found them a country house they could spend time together as a family on weekends, go apple picking or antiquing. Roy could write in a restored barn overlooking a babbling brook. Shy could have a horse. She clicked on a map of the Hudson Valley. Millbrook, Rhinebeck, Milan, Hudson. There were real estate offices in every town, with websites. Oh, here was a pretty house, in someplace called Ancram—with a pool!
* * *
“Hello? Dad?” Shy called as she closed and locked the front door to their four-story brownstone. The parlor floor consisted of a giant great room with French doors that led to a terrace overlooking the garden. The house had been built in the early nineteen hundreds and had been modernized and remodeled many times, but it maintained its old New York charm. Upstairs were four enormous bedrooms. Downstairs was an entire apartment.
“We could do Airbnb,” Shy’s father had suggested once. “Let out a room or two to travelers.”
“And have a bunch of strangers tromping around, stealing things and stopping up the toilets? I don’t think so,” Wendy said, ending the conversation.
“I’m home,” Shy called again. “Are you here?”
“Here,” Roy Clarke called from the library, which was really just the far right-hand portion of the gigantic open-plan living room. Somehow Wendy had convinced them to call it the library because it was where most of the bookshelves were. “All writers have libraries,” she declared, and thus it was so.
Roy Clarke was sprawled in his favorite armchair, his bathrobe tied over his clothes, a book in his lap. The TV was on but muted, a cooking show.
“I showered and got dressed and went out this morning. I brought my computer and everything,” he announced as Shy came into the room. “I even wrote a few words over a nice cup of tea at the most perfect old bar. I’m so glad I discovered it. I wrote the beginning of a chapter, or the beginning of something anyway. Then I got pretty famished from all the writing, so I went to the supermarket. And then I came home.”
“I’m not Mum,” Shy said. “I don’t care.” She sniffed the air. It smelled like cinnamon. “Did you bake something? It smells amazing.”
Her father’s gray-whiskered face turned pink. “You know those cinnamon buns that come in the tins that you pop open and bake and then squirt that pasty sugary stuff on?”
She nodded.
“I’d never had them before,” her father went on. “I went to Key Food for bread and cheese and came out with those. I baked them, and then I ate them all. Marvelous.”
“What about that guy’s cat, the invisible one?”
“Fed it already.”
Shy unzipped her hoodie and kicked off her sneakers. “I’m starving.” It was cold in the house. She flopped down on the sofa and pulled the cashmere throw over her legs and feet. By assuming the pose of a sick girl, she now felt a true chill coming on. “Will you make me a cheese toastie?” It was what her father called a grilled cheese and what she craved whenever she had a cold or cramps.
“Are you poorly, my sweet?” her father asked, exaggerating his accent.
Shy missed England. It was so much less stressful. People sat in their sitting rooms watching telly and eating toast soldiers and drinking sweet, milky tea. There was so much less walking. But her mother was from Manhattan and felt very strongly that New York City was the only real city in the world and that they needed to move there. It was her father who’d insisted on Brooklyn because it felt more authentic. Manhattan was just a giant tourist attraction. Her mother resisted at first. “Brooklyn isn’t really New York,” she’d said. When it turned out living in Brooklyn was so much more fashionable than living in Manhattan, and that they could buy a whole house with a garden instead of living in an apartment, Wendy gave in. As long as Shy attended private school.
Roy Clarke went into the large, open kitchen area, located the electric sandwich press, and set it atop the butcher-block island in the center of the kitchen.
“I’ll make you a cheese toastie if you tell me what you’re doing home so early.”
Shy had hoped her father wouldn’t notice. “I don’t know,” she told him honestly. “Mum was at school, talking to my teachers. I went out for lunch and kept walking. I just wanted to be home. I had Latin this morning.”
Roy knew it was wrong, but he liked that his daughter enjoyed his company and was willing to eat in front of him but not her mother. He made two sandwiches. They ate them directly off the kitchen counter, gobbling them up so quickly they didn’t have time to talk. Then he made two more.
Gold. Every time he blinked, there it was in 28-point bold italics, centered in the middle of his mind’s eye. That hadn’t happened with Black and White. It was a good sign. His American fans would love it, if any of them were still alive by the time he finished writing the book. If he were still alive. Or maybe Black, White & Gold? No, that sounded like a law firm. He didn’t do legal writing either. No courtroom dramas or anything too technical. Too much research. Too much room for error. Black and Gold and Gold and White White on White with Black or Gold. Blimey.
Shy never asked about his writing. Either she wasn’t interested or she didn’t want to nag.
“Hey Dad, do you want to go see a movie?” she asked him now.
“I thought you were ill.” He retrieved the cloth from the sink and wiped the sandwich crumbs from the counter.
“I feel well enough to watch a movie.” Shy dug an unopened can of Coke out of her schoolbag and cracked it open. Wendy refused to keep soda in the house. What did she think Shy subsisted on—air?
“I was going to call and check on your sisters, but I’m sure they’d rather I didn’t.”
Shy’s older sisters—Chloe, twenty-two, and Anna, twenty-one—lived in Oxford, where they’d gone to university, and worked in a lab. They were science nerds and extremely dismissive of their father, mother, and little sister. They especially disapproved of the move to New York.
“I’ll watch a film with you if it’s at the local cinema and if we can get those tiny chocolate buttons with the white sprinkles on them.”