It's Not Shakespeare Read Free Page A

beautiful nieces whom he got to spoil unmercifully. In fact, thinking about them now, he added his nieces to his list of things he didn’t hate about his life. His sister was also on the list, but not as high up as Pilar, Francesca, and Anabella. (Susan had a master’s degree in Italian architecture—she’d spent a year there before coming back to the states to start her own firm, and she always claimed the culture stuck.)
    “As always, darling, and you?”
    James sighed. “I’m afraid not, Mom. For one thing, I don’t know what I’d do with Marlowe—I don’t want to bring him out for such a short trip, because that’s hard on a dog, and for another…” And this was just so embarrassing. “Finances are a little tight,” he confessed, embarrassed because a forty-three year old man and a tenured professor shouldn’t have this problem. Unfortunately, the recession had hit teachers hard—community college teachers weren’t immune. His house—bought up in the fashionable Stanford Ranch area—had also had a balloon payment so he could keep his low interest rate. He didn’t want to think about what kind of repairs were waiting on his car. And, well, it didn’t count that he’d had his savings wiped out three years ago by… a person whose name he no longer spoke.
    His mother knew about that—and she usually left it alone, because a man had his pride, but sometimes, well, sometimes you just didn’t want to haul your poor befuddled dog three-thousand miles across the country when it meant you might not be able to have that annoying rattle fixed on your ten-year-old car.
    Now she sighed, the long-suffering sigh of martyrdom that he always feared.
    “James….”
    “Please don’t say it.”
    “Really, darling….”
    “Please don’t say it!”
    “But it feels like you’re only staying out there for spite, darling! Not everything about Maine is bad, right?”
    “Mother, I like it here.”
    “I don’t see why!”
    “Well, Marlowe and I are the only ones who need to see why,” he said firmly. “Please, can we not argue about this anymore?”
    “But it was only one man, James!” His mother’s voice lost its polish and its equanimity for a moment, and she became the waitress working her way through a Princeton scholarship who had first attracted James’s father. “It was one man—and just because he was a sonovabitch doesn’t mean you have to leave the state forever!”
    James sighed. “You don’t get it, Mom. It’s like… like….” He thought about watching those rainclouds come down from the Sierras that day. He thought about the smell of the sea from over one-hundred miles away. The electric tingle of those moments made the thing he was going to say right now sound less silly. “It’s like, you know how sometimes you feel like you’re waiting for something to happen? Well, whatever it is, I want it to happen here.”
    There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then his mother gave a laugh that sounded more and more like the girl James saw in his parents’ wedding pictures, and less and less like the sophisticated harridan who specialized in making James feel somehow disappointing without even trying.
    “Well, James, knock me over with a feather. I think I finally see the poet in you, darling. You’ll have that best-selling novel out yet!”
    “My last book was very well reviewed,” he said with dignity. And it had been—in a publication that specialized in fiction works by academicians only, that maybe five people in the world subscribed to.
    “It was wonderful,” she said, and he remembered that same tone of voice when he presented her with a macaroni necklace and a clay ashtray after summer camp.
    “Thanks Mom,” he murmured. “I’ve got to go now. Papers to grade.” It was a lie, of course. He’d graded all his midterm assignments the week before. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot else to do, right?
    “Bye, sweetheart. I love you. Talk to you on Sunday,