Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

Leo nodded his head in sincere agreement. “You should.”

Rae smiled at him and then turned her attention back to Franny. “Sometimes they have one of the kids in the program introduce the old men. Speaking of, I should get a look at your ID.”

Franny rummaged around in her purse for her wallet and then handed her driver’s license to the bartender, who took a pair of readers out of her pants pocket and actually looked at it, which was more than Franny ever did. Franny almost never carded anyone, and when she did, she figured that someone handing you identification was tantamount to being of age.

When Rae was satisfied she handed both the glasses and the license to Leo. “Look at this,” she said. “Frances is almost twenty-five. Honest to God, I would have thought you were seventeen. That’s the thing about getting older. Everybody else starts looking younger.”

Leo took the glasses and looked for himself. “The Commonwealth of Virginia?” he said, and turned the license over, maybe wondering if she had chosen to donate her organs. “I thought you were from Los Angeles.”

“I am, but I learned to drive in Virginia.”

“So if she isn’t your student and she doesn’t know you’re supposed to start reading in twenty minutes, who is she?” Her tone was still jolly but Rae was looking only at Leo now, and Leo continued to look at the driver’s license.

“She’s my bartender,” he said in distraction, and then, remembering himself, he looked up at Rae and smiled. “My other bartender.”

Franny didn’t correct him. The woman behind the bar did not wish to hear another word from her. Rae poured Dewar’s in two glasses and pushed them forward. “That’s eight,” she said. The breadsticks and water were not her problem. A crowd was starting to form at the warm end of the bar, farthest away from the door, and she went to attend to them.

Leo Posen put a ten-dollar bill on the bar. If he understood what had just happened with his friend who made him ice at home and brought it to work in a baggie, he gave no indication. He was paying attention to his drink. “I have to give a reading and then there’s a party for me afterwards. It’s one of the obligations. There aren’t many of them and they’re all written down in my contract. I don’t have to go to any of the other parties.”

“Were you going to tell me about the reading?”

Leo gave his head a small shake. “The way I was figuring it, I didn’t think I’d have to. In the first place, I didn’t really think you’d come from Chicago on a bus, and if you did come, then you’d be tired and want to rest in your hotel room. I’m always tired when I come to a new place. Travel makes me tired, newness makes me tired, and I never go anywhere on a bus, so I was thinking that if you came you’d need to go straight to bed. Clearly, you have more resources than I do.”

“Even if you managed to ditch me at the hotel while you read and picked me up afterwards for the party, wouldn’t you think that someone might say, ‘Didn’t you enjoy the reading?’” If she had never met him she would have come. Had she known that Leon Posen was giving a reading in Iowa City, she would have come by herself on the bus. Kumar would have shirked his responsibilities as editor of the law review, something he’d never done, for the chance to go with her. That was the thing Leo Posen didn’t understand.

“Or they would say, ‘My God, what an interminable reading.’ And by the way, I wouldn’t be ditching you. I would be sparing you. The impulse was polite.”

Franny smiled and Leo Posen looked at his watch, then he stretched his neck in Rae’s direction. She was laughing with her new customers at the other end of the bar, the broad beam of her back squarely towards them. “You’re a professional. What’s the best trick you know for getting your bartender back when you’re in a rush?”

“Take them to your reading as your date,” Franny said. “It works every time.”

He tapped the face of his watch as if questioning the news. “It’s just that it would be so helpful to have one more before we go.”

Franny slid her glass over to him. The ice, so thoughtfully made, was just beginning to melt, softening the Dewar’s with water bottled from an ancient spring in France. “I don’t actually drink,” she said. “This is a trick I figured out a long time ago. It makes people like me.”

Leo looked at the glass, and then he looked at Franny. “My God,” he said. “You’re a magician.”

An unfamiliar bicycle was parked in the hallway outside her apartment where people were not supposed to park their bikes but of course that did nothing to tip her off. Jeanette opened the door, the grocery bags cutting into her wrists, her coat and boots made heavy and hot by the four flights of stairs, and found her brother sitting on the couch with her son in his lap.

“Look! Look!” her husband said. In his excitement Fodé hugged her before thinking to free her from the plastic bags. Bintou, their babysitter, rushed to wrestle the bags from her other arm and then helped her out of her coat. They treated her like this, the two of them, like she was the queen of Williamsburg.

“Albie?” There was no question that this was her brother but it was the difference between seeing a boy and a man. Albie’s hair, which had been a sweet mess of dark curls, was now a thick braid long enough to make Jeanette wonder if he’d cut it even once since she’d seen him last. And where had the cheekbones come from? There were rumors of the Mattaponi tribe slivered into the DNA on their mother’s side. Maybe the Mattaponi had risen again in the youngest Cousins child. He looked like he was playing the part. “My wild Indian,” Teresa used to say when he would run through the house screaming. Now here he was, as thin and as quiet as a knife.

“Surprise,” Albie said, the word a flat statement of fact: I am surprised to be in your living room. You are surprised that I’m here. Then he added the thing that had been the most surprising to him, “You have a baby.” Dayo, the baby, was holding on to the rope of Albie’s hair. He gave his mother an enormous smile, both to say he was glad she had come back to him and also he was very pleased with their exotic guest.

“Scarf,” Bintou said, and unwound the damp wool from Jeanette’s neck. She plucked the hat from her head and shook off the melted snow. It was February.

Jeanette turned to her husband. “This is my brother,” she said, as if he were the one who had just walked through the door. It felt almost accidental seeing Albie in her living room, the way some other long-lost siblings might run into one another in an airport, at a funeral.

“I saw him on the street!” Fodé said. “He was walking a bicycle away from our building just as I was coming home from work.”

Albie nodded to confirm the implausible story. “He came running after me. I thought he was some crazy guy.”

“New York,” Bintou said.

The good news washed over Fodé, poured from him, the thrill of it still so fresh. “Except I was calling your name, Albie! Albie! The crazy guys don’t know your name.”

Jeanette wanted nothing but to step into the hallway for five minutes and pull her thoughts together. The room was too cramped: Albie and Dayo sat on the couch like guests while she and Fodé and Bintou remained standing. Had they just now come in the door or had they been waiting for her for a while? How much of their discussion had she missed?

“You were just walking down the street?” she said to Albie, My street, of all the streets in all the world?

“I was coming to see you,” he said. “I rang the bell.” He shrugged as if to say that was it, he’d tried.