I stood up to introduce myself, enthralled by the look, but terrified that when she opened her mouth it would be like that moment in Singin’ In the Rain when the beautiful silent movie actress has to speak and caterwauling sounds come out. She smiled, seeming a little bit awkward and shy, told me her name—Allison Leslie Scott—her voice was fine, just fine—and shook my hand. We sat down. I asked her if she’d like something to eat or drink.

“A sparkling water.”

“Nothing to eat?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t eat a thing here,” she said.

“So why did you pick it?”

“Oh,” she clasped her hands together right between her modest, but high and firm breasts, looked briefly down at her hands, sort of biting her lips, then looked back up and said, “It was the most meretricious place I could think of.”

“And by that you mean?”

She cocked her head a little. Who was testing whom? Was I ignorant of what it meant, or did I suspect that she was using a word that was too big for her? She said, “Garish, glitzy, ornate yet phony. Tinsel and tawdry.”

“Alright, but why would you want to go someplace like that?”

“To give me the opportunity to say ‘meretricious.’ It’s such a gorgeous and underutilized word in a world that’s growing more meretricious every day.”

“You like using ostentatious words in a pretentious way,” I said.

“I thought,” she said, “it would make me seem precocious and eager to appear older than I am.”

“How old are you? Really.”

“I meant in terms of the scenario. A precocious fourteen-year-old, who’s read too many books and would like to know more of real life but trembles before it.” Which was pretty much how she sounded.

“I think this is going to work,” I said.

“Where are we going for this party?” she asked. “And how should I dress?”

“It’s actually a fundraiser,” I said.

“For?”

“For the libraries of the Hudson Valley.”

“That’s so…laudable,” she said. “I majored in literature. Briefly. But I still have a great admiration for it. And where is it?”

“About an hour and a half upstate. Near Rhinebeck.”

“Oh, how perfect,” she said. “How wonderful to be back there.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PRAYERS?

“A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND miles begins with a single step.”