I looked at the manuscript. I’d been impatiently measuring her progress by the look of the pages, slight creases and folds for the ones she’d read, straight and crisp for the ones she hadn’t. There were no crisp pages left and, as Carolyn poured herself a glass of orange juice and stood drinking at the kitchen counter, I realized that I no longer wanted to know her opinion. I was in a glum mood and didn’t feel my ego could take another beating. Besides, I figured that if she liked the book, she would’ve already said something, perhaps mentioning a scene or a line that had made her laugh, but she hadn’t said a peep. In the last week, I had resigned myself to letting it go, accepting it for what it was. I was still learning, still teaching myself to write, and I hoped the book’s takeaway was that it had somehow made me better.

“So it was all for a girl?” she asked. “Why he was so messed up, because he lost the girl when he was twenty?”

“I hope you really don’t think that,” I said.

“That’s how it seemed.”

“I mean, that’s certainly part of it. He lost her and his mother while he was in Vietnam. Leave happy, come back empty and hollow, the world gone to shit, mother dead, fiancée far away and in the arms of another. Thus he found refuge in the warm interiors of the local bars and from the men who entered each day seeking the very same company.”

“Do you think that’s believable?”

“Yes, of course. Hence why I wrote a two-hundred-and-sixty-eight-page book about it.”

“Don’t get defensive,” she said.

I sighed. “You didn’t like it, did you?”

“I haven’t decided. There are parts I liked a lot, actually. I loved the dog, Charley. He made me smile. And I liked the two old men he drank with, Harry and Smokie. They made me laugh and reminded me of Gene. I don’t know, I think I got annoyed that he blamed everyone around him for his problems.”

“He didn’t blame anyone but himself.”

“You think?”

I closed my eyes and stayed silent for a while.

“Did you at least like the end?”

“I don’t know. He gets arrested, misses his bus, and just starts walking because he’s out of money?”

“Just starts walking. He had had enough. Did you understand the river and the clock tower in the final paragraph, that the river is symbolic for a baptism, as though he and Charley were being washed of the town and his past, but yet the clock tower reminds him that regardless of where he goes, he’ll never be fully absolved?”

“Hmmm,” she said. “No, I didn’t pick up on that.”