The Grand Tour by Adam O'Fallon Price Page B

the encroaching borders of your own existence. He’d watched it happen with his mother over the years. She’d been prone to bouts of silent depression since he could remember, but it was as though when his father left, the illness had moved in permanently to take his place. It had gotten worse over the years despite an endless battery of different medications and despite his best efforts to help. In six years, there had been no turnarounds, no moments of stunning realization—just minor ups and downs, mostly downs, a haze of cigarette smoke, and the constant, faint chatter of the TV. The worst part was not the illness itself; it was her assent to it, her willingness to live in her own shadow. In his manuscript, he had written about her, about living with her, and in this fictionalized version, she pulled out of it. The narrator, a diffident and sensitive young man, watched as she began building a new house in their front yard. Over three years, she poured the foundation, built the frame, and, one by one, laid the bricks. Then together, they destroyed the old house.
    “Can I help you find something?” The voice plucked him from his reverie, and he turned to see the same girl from the hard-boiled section. She wore a store name tag, he saw now, although he couldn’t read it due to, it really seemed, a sudden attack of eyeball perspiration.
    “No.” She started away, and he called after her with “Um, D. H. Lawrence?” in a voice so cracking and desperately lame it shocked even him. She stopped and motioned for him to follow. At the end of the aisle, Lawrence’s disreputable oeuvre, in many different editions, reclined luxuriously on a long shelf.
    “Anything in particular?”
    “No, just looking.”
    “Okay. I have to say, I’m kind of impressed. Not many people read old David Herbert these days.”
    “He’s great.”
    “I agree.” She was not especially attractive, looking up at him with eyes set wide in a pointed, foxy face, but at that moment, Vance would have murdered a thousand men if she’d asked. He couldn’t think of anything to say. She said, “Well, enjoy!” and moved away with a bright, brief flash of calf. Somewhere in the distance, a microphone crackled on, spearing the stale, dusty air with feedback. “Thank you for coming,” rumbled Richard’s voice, and Vance fought his way back through the maze, the catacombs of books.
    ———
    The reading went well, or at least undisastrously; Richard took a few questions from the small but packed room, and then it was over. He asked Anne-Marie—he had relearned the name, and written the initials
AM
in tiny script on his palm—if she wanted to get a drink, and she said sure, that she’d be delighted. He wondered if he’d ever before occasioned delight in another person. Surely he had delighted Eileen once or twice during their years together, but that had been a long, long time ago. He asked Vance if he wanted to join them, but the kid demurred; predictably, he wondered if it might not be a better idea to take it easy tonight.
    “Make hay while the sun shines.”
    “The sun’s not shining, though.”
    Vance returned to the hotel—laden with an armful of D. H. Lawrence, of all things—and Anne-Marie took Richard to a place just down the street that she said was new but that looked old. Waiting an unreasonable amount of time to be served at the unbusy bar, he saw it was a trendy type of faux old, with lots of oak and brass veneers and vintage mirrors made of smoked glass and a bartender wearing those arm braces bartenders wear in westerns. Anne-Marie ordered them both locally distilled artisanal rye whiskey, whatever that was. They sat in a corner booth, under a speaker that played Sinatra or some similar wife-beating big-band crooner, a style of music Richard hated. But they talked about him, which he liked. He got to be all cannily self-effacing and funny, yet soulful and serious, a routine that he vaguely remembered working with women