“I’m sure they are,” said Todd. “I’m just going to watch some TV and go to bed.”

“Good for you, scout,” said Sara. “Well, goodnight, author man. And hurry home.”

“I will,” said Todd.

And to his amazement, he did.

*  *  *

Waiting for something to happen is the surest way to make nothing happen. Waiting for someone else to do something is the longest haul in the world. Every day Todd would get up, have breakfast, call Mike (Joe having disappeared from the scene), and maybe drive down to Legolas Books.

Todd would later realize that he had little or no memory of this time. It wasn’t the quiet time—there was too much anticipation for that—but it wasn’t a memorable time either. Even Janis seemed to have—disappeared wasn’t the right word, but she wasn’t on Todd’s personal radar. Todd pictured her with her mystery lover—for some reason he wanted to say demon lover—going to bars, watching strange specialty acts, and then maybe slowly vanishing into a kind of demi-monde underground about whose details he was enormously vague.

Mostly what Todd remembered about this time was the tension. Todd and Janis had never had kids—Todd never saw himself as a dad and after the first couple of years, Janis didn’t see him as one either—but he found he could suddenly sympathize with expectant fathers in old movies, pacing around outside the delivery room, waiting for the happy event to occur so they could faint or hand around cigars. Except in Todd’s case, the happy event wasn’t going to be a bouncing baby but a big fat Great American Novel. And he was secretly worried—no, terrified—that the last few weeks had been nothing more than a phantom pregnancy.

*  *  *

Things had begun promisingly. In the days after his return from New York, Nora or Carrie had been in fairly regular phone contact.

“We’ve gotten a lot of positive reactions from retailers,” Nora would say, or Carrie would tell him, “Everybody is so excited about All My Colors, it’s ridiculous.”

And then nothing would happen. There’d be a few bits of grain strewn his way—someone would pass on a favorable remark, or Carrie would say the cover design was coming along—but nothing was actually happening. It was like a moment in a stage play where an actor has forgotten a line and the prompt has lost her place in the script, so the cast are just staring at each other and saying things like, “Wonderful weather we’re having for this time of year,” as the prompt drops her script on the floor and utters a muffled curse. Except longer. Much longer.