Karen and Nikki were excited when I told them I was going to have lunch with an Author.
“Maybe she’ll come to Girls’ Night In,” Nikki suggested. “I want to meet her.”
“Do you like her stuff?”
“Actually, I’ve never read any. But I’ve never met a writer.” I looked at her. “Except for you. Sorry, Charlie.”
“That’s better,” I said. “We’ll have to be careful. She might put us all in a book.”
Karen thought that would be neat. “Maybe years later some biographer would figure out what characters were us. ‘The beautiful Countess Whoever in Whatever was based on her great friend . . .’ Of course, if it was me, it would be, ‘The worn out soccer mom.’”
I suppose the character based on me would be the quiet librarian with a vivid imagination. Nikki would be the American woman married to a charming European. I couldn’t imagine what she would do with Ed.
At lunchtime, I walked over to Emily’s office. I was nervous. Alice had seemed very nice at the lecture, but maybe she was tired of fans. She probably has groupies.
“Do I look all right?” I asked Emily. I don’t know what looking all right to meet an author was.
“Sure, come on. She won’t bite you.”
Alice was sitting at her desk. She looked up and smiled and I thought of Duke when he sees the leash being picked up. “Oh, hi! I was just going to see if you wanted to go to lunch.” She looked at me. “You must be Charlie. Emily’s told me a lot about you.”
(I said a prayer that she hadn’t told her about the blog or if she had, Alice hadn’t read that I had compared her to a Lab puppy. Or that I’d wondered if she might be a prospect.)
“Oh,” I said.
“Nothing bad, of course. She says you have a blog.”
Oh, no, I thought.
“I haven’t read it yet. I didn’t want to get any preconceived ideas before I met you.”
Thank you, Jesus!
“Of course, you probably have some preconceived ideas about me.”
“Now, be nice, Alice.” Emily said.
“Oh, I wasn’t going to ask you what they were. But whenever I meet someone, they always say I wasn’t what they expected. I never know whether that’s a compliment or not.”
Alice had an arrangement of sentimental Victorian dog and cat pictures on her wall, and the opening of Little Women written in calligraphy.
“I got that at Louisa May Alcott’s house in Concord. I could quote it when I was a kid.”
“’It’s so dreadful to be poor,’” Emily sighed.
“You have to look at your hands and sigh again.”
“I have cousins named Meghan, Joanna, Bethany, and Jim.” I said. “His name is really James, and we called him Jamie until he figured out why.”
“That is so cool.”
“And my mother’s name was Louisa. Most of the women in my mother’s family had literary names. In fact, my grandmother was named Alice after Alice in Wonderland.”
“I was named after my great aunt, but people keep giving me Alice in Wonderland stuff. But it’s nice to have a thing; people have less trouble finding presents for you. I have some old Alice pictures, but I didn’t want to put them up here. It might be a bit much.”
By then we were in the hall. I saw that Alice had taped literary cartoons on the door.
We had lunch at a pizza place around the corner. Emily and Alice both had classes and I had to get back to the library. “It was great meeting you,” Alice said. “Maybe we can do dinner and go someplace fancy. Or lunch again.”
“That would be terrific,” I said. We exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and I wrote down the name of the blog for her.
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