Await Your Reply Read Free

really. But she sat up, straightened her back, smiled.
    “You look like you’ve been hypnotized,” he said.
    “I’m fine,” she said. She put her palms against her hair, smoothing it down.
    She paused; George Orson gazed at her with that mind reader look he had.
    “I’m fine,
” she said.

    She and George Orson were going to be living in the old house behind the motel, just for a short time, just until they got things figured out. Just until “the heat” was off a bit, he told her. She couldn’t tell how much of this was a joke. He often spoke ironically. He could do imitations and accents and quotations from movies and books.
    We can pretend we are “fugitives on the lam,” he said, wryly, as they sat in a parlor or sitting room, with fancy lamps and wingback chairs that had been draped with sheets, and he put his hand on her thigh, petting her leg with a slow, reassuring stroke. She put her Diet Coke onto a doily on the old coffee table, and a bead of perspiration ran down the side of the can.
    She didn’t see why they couldn’t be fugitives in Monaco or the Bahamas or even the Riviera Maya area of Mexico.
    But—“Be patient,” George Orson said, and gave her one of his looks, somewhere between teasing and tender, bending his head to look into her eyes when she glanced away. “Trust me,” he said in that confiding voice he had.
    And so, okay, she had to admit that things could be worse. She could still be in Pompey, Ohio.
    She had believed—had been led to believe—that they were going to be rich, and yes of course that was one of the things that she wanted. “A lot of money,” George Orson had told her, lowering his voice, lowering his eyes sidelong in that shy conspiratorial way. “Let’s just say that I made some
… investments,
” he said, as if the word were a code that they both understood.
    That was the day that they left. They were traveling down Interstate 80 toward this piece of property that George Orson had inherited from his mother. “The Lighthouse,” he said. The Lighthouse Motel.
    They’d been on the road for an hour or so, and George Orson was in a playful mood. He had once known how to say hello in onehundred different languages, and he was trying to see if he could remember them all.
    “
Zdravstvuite,
” George Orson said.
“Ni hao.
”
    “Bonjour,
” said Lucy, who had loathed her two required years of French, her teacher, the gently unforgiving Mme Fournier, repeating those unpronounceable vowels over and over.
    “Päivää,
” George Orson said.
“Konichiwa. Kehro haal aahei.
”
    “Hola,
” Lucy said, in the deadpan voice that George Orson found so funny.
    “You know, Lucy,” George Orson said cheerfully. “If we’re going to be world travelers, you’re going to have to learn new languages. You don’t want to be one of those American tourist types who assume that everyone speaks English.”
    “I don’t?”
    “Not unless you want everyone to hate you.” And he smiled his sad, lopsided grin. He let his hand rest lightly on her knee. “You’re going to be so
cosmopolitan,
” he said tenderly.
    This had always been one of the big things that she liked about him. He had a great vocabulary, and even from the beginning, he’d treated her as if she knew what he was talking about. As if they had a secret, the two of them.
    “You’re a remarkable person, Lucy.” This was one of the first things that he’d ever said to her.
    They were sitting in his classroom after school, she had ostensibly come to talk about the test for the next week, but that had faded away fairly quickly. “I honestly don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he’d told her, and then he waited. That smile, those green eyes.
    “You’re different from other people around here,” he said.
    Which was, she thought, true. But how did
he
know? No one else in her school thought so. Even though she did better than anyone else in the entire school on the SAT, even though she