While she waited for John and the Mortensens, she smoothed back her hair in the hallway mirror. She’d changed out of her usual work jeans and into a sweater, skirt, and boots. Thank God her apartment no longer smelled of cat urine! She felt a twinge of nerves, as John poked his head into her apartment.
Whoop came to twine himself around her legs in an affectionate way. “So that’s the beast, huh?” John said, crouching to rub him between the ears. Rona and Ralph wandered over to the bay window, as everyone did, to look at her view of the city, but John walked straight to her desk. He noted the abundance of blue objects she had placed around her desk, because she found the color calming. He picked up the cup of carefully sharpened 2H pencils Pru favored, said, “Hmm . . .” rather pointedly, and replaced it on her desk. He looked at the pictures of Annali, Patsy, her parents, and Pru identified them for John.
“Is this your phone?” he said, picking up her phone.
“Yes.”
“And this is your computer?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.” He leaned over to squint at her screen, and she wondered if she’d left up any offensive e-mail from her group of college friends, who tended to be extremely caustic, to say the least, in their online conversations. John sat down in her chair. “Do you sit here?”
“When I’m not standing.”
“So here I am, Pru Whistler, making my way in the world,” he said.
Just as she was leaning over to move the pencil cup back to where it belonged, John stood up. He almost stood up right into her. It would have been the perfect moment to kiss her. Ralph and Rona were busy at the window, trying to find the Capitol building. It wouldn’t have taken but the slightest, most undetectable movement. It wouldn’t have taken but a second.
He stepped back and looked at her like, Uh-oh. To hide her annoyance, she screwed up her face at him. He screwed his up back at her.
“You guys ready?” Pru said. Ralph and Rona had plastered themselves so discreetly to the window that they were practically on the other side of the glass.
PRU HAD BEEN RIGHT ABOUT BRINGING THEM TO NPR. Rona kept exclaiming over the photos of the on-air talent that lined the walls of the lobby: “That’s what she looks like?” and “I thought he’d be bigger!” Noah had gotten them in to see one of the live news programs, which was fun to watch because they were orchestrated from a central pit, around which the recording booths stood. In the pit there was a director, who motioned cues to the readers and the engineers while keeping a constant eye on an enormous digital clock in front of him. There were mad scrambles when a piece failed to play, or the show had gotten off the clock somehow, and the director had to figure out what to cut or lengthen in order to make up the difference in time. This was something she’d be good at, Pru considered. She had an unwavering internal clock. However, she didn’t think she could handle the stress. Fiona said that Noah was constantly hanging up on her, because of the time. She’d never survive in such an impolite environment.
Ralph and Rona watched it all with fascination and eagerness, even when the action slowed down during lengthy, prerecorded field reports, when the on-air talent took off their headphones and drank coffee together in the hallway, complaining about the funding environment. Ralph and Rona went out of the observer’s booth after the show to meet them and shake their hands.
“I’d like to be called ‘the talent,’” Pru said to John.
“I’ll start calling you that,” he said. “More coffee, please, for ‘the talent.’”
They took a cab back to the café and John cooked eggs for everyone. Although she’d prepared herself for it, no one mentioned Gaia. Or Lila. Pru had to wonder if that had something to do with her being there.
When she left them at the front door of the café, Rona put an arm around Pru and squeezed her, whispering, “Now, you, we get.”
You, we get. You, we get, Pru thought, going up her front steps. Was she crazy, or had Rona just told her about a dozen things she’d been dying to know? She couldn’t wait to call Kate, to discuss.
She was just putting the key in the front door when a cheery voice behind her said, “Hi!”
She turned around and almost screamed. There, bouncing on his toes, hands shoved into the pockets of the trench coat that she’d helped him buy, was Rudy.
Rudy Fisch.
HE LOOKED THINNER AND PALER THAN SHE HAD REMEMBERED. “You don’t have a cold or anything, do you?” he said, putting his hands up in front of him. “I’m a walking Petri dish.”
“Rudy,” she gasped.
“Yes, it’s me. Can I come up? It’s not good for me to be outside for too long. Come on,” he added, seeing her hesitation. “I know I owe you an apology.”
She couldn’t think of an excuse, so she simply let him in. They got into the elevator and Rudy hit the button for her floor.
“What is going on with you, Rudy?” she said. Of all the times she’d been anxious about running into Rudy, this wasn’t one of them. In fact, she hadn’t thought of him in ages, she realized.
“I haven’t been working,” Rudy said. “They’ve put me on short-term disability. I’ve
