"Let’s just say I’d been on many, many bad dates by the time The Late Bloomer came across my desk. I’m a romantic person, but sometimes these don’t seem like romantic times to me. The Late Bloomer is a book about the possibility of finding great love at any age. Sounds cliché, I know." - P99
She stirs the harpoon around the tomato juice-tinted waters of her Queequeg, trying to recapture a shrimp that’s gone AWOL. - P99
"Hey A.J.," she calls. "There’s something kind of heroic about being a bookseller, and there’s also something kind of heroic about adopting a child." - P101
"My friends call me Amy," she says. - P101
None with sales reps I like as well as you is his first draft, but he decides this is too presumptuous for a girl with an American hero fiancé. He redrafts. It’s a compelling list for Knightley, I guess. - P102
Not for me, unfortunately, A.J. replies. Looking forward to seeing what’s on Knightley’s summer list. Yours, A.J. - P103
Amelia fancies herself a Sookie Stackhouse type. - P103
Lambiase hosts his Chief’s Choice Book Club at the store that night (selection: L.A. Confidential), and after that, as is their tradition, he and A.J. share a bottle. - P104
"Bad timing," Lambiase proclaims. "I’ve been a police officer for twenty years now and I’ll tell you, pretty much every bad thing in life is a result of bad timing, and every good thing is the result of good timing." - P104
"Think about it. If Tamerlane hadn’t gotten stolen, you wouldn’t have left the door unlocked, and Marian Wallace wouldn’t have left the baby in the store. Good timing is what that was." - P104
"Still bad timing. Your wife had died. And then you had Maya." - P104
"Sounds like a latter-period Philip Roth novel," he says. - P106
Rosie crosses her arm. "That’s one of those things you say to sound smart, right?" she says. "But, really, you’re trying to make someone else feel stupid." - P106
He suspects she is right. He is a snob, not suited for relationships. He will raise his daughter, run his store, read his books, and that, he decides, will be more than enough. - P106
She is an enthusiastic if not overly graceful mouse. She scurries with abandon. She wrinkles her nose in a recognizably mousy way. She wags her pipe-cleaner tail, which had been painstakingly coiled by him. - P109
Snow is beginning to fall, and the flakes catch in Maya’s whiskers. He wants to take a picture, but he doesn’t want to do the thing where you stop to take a picture. "Whiskers become you," A.J. tells her. - P110
"Good job. I’m forty-three, and in these years I’ve learned that it’s better to have loved and lost and blah blah blah and that it’s better to be alone than be with someone you don’t really fancy. Do you agree?" - P110
She nods, and he squats on the ground so that she can get on his back. "Put your arms around my neck." Once she is mounted, he stands, groaning a little. "You’re bigger than you used to be." - P111
As do most women, Maya likes Daniel. - P112
AT LAST IT is March. The roads thaw, turning everything to muck. Ferry service resumes, as do Daniel Parish’s wanderings. Sales reps come to town with their summer offerings, and A.J. goes out of his way to be hospitable to them. He takes to wearing a tie as a way of signaling to Maya that he is "at work" as opposed to "at home." - P114
The project hadn’t taken him long since he’d liked it more than he expected —a cross between Flannery O’Connor southern gothic and The Fall of the House of Usher or Caligula. He’d been planning to casually dazzle Amelia with his True Blood knowledge when she came to town. - P115
He writes, I’m sorry you’re hurt. Had been looking forward to hearing Knightley’s summer list. Hope we can reschedule soon. Also, and it pains me to say this—"Giving Jason Stackhouse vampire blood is like giving Ho Hos to a diabetic." - P116
He is fascinated by the Amelianess of the things in the frame behind her: a mason jar filled with dying sunflowers, a diploma from Vassar (he thinks it says), a bobblehead of Hermione Granger, a framed picture of a young Amelia and people he guesses are her parents, a lamp with a polka-dotted scarf draped over it, a stapler that looks like a Keith Haring figure, an old edition of some book whose title A.J. cannot make out, a bottle of sparkly nail polish, a windup lobster, a set of plastic vampire fangs, an unopened bottle of good champagne, a— - P117
|