“We’re acquainted,” he told Maggie. Pickles moved her head—was the dog nodding?
Anthony shook the flowers a little bit and held them out to Maggie. “These are for your mom.”
Maggie considered him, then took the flowers and placed them on the counter, then jumped so she was sitting on the counter. It was a look that wasn’t quite a scowl but it wasn’t quite a smile either—it lived somewhere in between, in the netherworld of human expression.
His editor would strike that last sentence. Chronic bestsellers were carried on the back of snappy dialogue and plot. Just ask Leonard Puckett. Write like you have a knife to your throat, Leonard Puckett was fond of saying.
Don’t be silly, Anthony. You don’t have an editor anymore.
“Did she say anything else?” he asked. “Your mom?”
Maggie studied Anthony and blew a green bubble. He thought it was going to pop all over her face but she had a nifty trick, allowing it to deflate quietly so she could suck it back into her mouth and begin the whole process over again. “Nope,” she said. “She didn’t.”
She watched Anthony implacably.
“Nothing at all?” He felt a little part of him begin to wither and wilt.
“She was busy, at work.”
Joy’s soft hair, Joy’s collarbone. The rest of it—oh, the rest of it! The things he’d done, the things he still wanted to do.
“All right, then. I’ll catch her later.” Anthony gestured toward the flowers on the counter. “You should probably put those in water.” He’d almost said we but he caught himself. Seemed too familiar, too presumptuous.
“I’m on it,” said Maggie authoritatively. She hopped down from the counter and scooped up the bouquet.
“I think there’s a little packet of flower food tucked inside there.” Early in their marriage Anthony had brought Cassie a fresh bouquet of roses every Friday evening; he knew his way around the care and feeding of flowers. He’d stopped once Cassie started sleeping with Glen Manning. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe Cassie had started sleeping with Glen Manning because Anthony had stopped bringing her roses.
But Maggie was way ahead of him. She was already cutting open the packet and dissolving it in a vase full of water. “Got it,” she said.
“Okay, then,” he said. “Bye, Maggie. Bye, Pickles.”
The former writer reluctantly left the house. And the lovely child with the purple streak in her hair turned the music back up and didn’t give him a second look.
As he was un-leaning his bike from the gate that separated Joy’s tiny yard from her neighbor’s, his phone rang. He thought, Joy! He answered without looking. But it was his mother.
“You never called me back, Anthony. I thought we were going to talk.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. What did you want to talk about?” He stuck his phone between his shoulder and ear and began to walk his bike.
“Your father started his book tour,” Dorothy said. “He’s in Madison, Connecticut. RJ Julia.” When Anthony was young, some of his favorite times were when his father was on book tour, and it was just the two of them in the house, him and his mother. They ate grilled cheese for dinner and played endless games of Spit and Crazy Eights. The very house seemed to breathe more easily, freed from the confines of Leonard’s needs, Leonard’s schedule, Leonard’s heavy footsteps.
Through the window he could see Maggie dancing and lip-syncing. If he really strained, he could hear the music too—the soundtrack was playing in order, “Schuyler Defeated” now. An island girl, wise and funny, with an open heart and a purple streak in her hair.
“Mom?” Anthony asked. “Did you have something specific you wanted to talk about?” He wouldn’t be able to ride a bike and talk on the phone at the same time. But if he told his mother he was about to get on a bike, it would sound like he was on vacation, not in exile, on his own personal Elba.
“I do,” she said. “I do have something specific. But it’s not a quick thing. If you don’t have time now . . . another time.”
“Okay,” he said. “Another time. Are you sure, Mom?”
“Another time,” she repeated. “Soon.”
Chapter 20
Lu
Lu read the email that had come through on her blogging service twice before she let herself believe it was true. A literary agent named Abigail Knowles, who worked at an agency in Manhattan called WLA, wanted to talk to Dinner by Dad about putting together a cookbook proposal to shop around to publishers.
I know a publisher will gobble this idea up, was the line Lu kept reading over and over again. The big bloggers all had cookbooks. A legitimate cookbook could raise the profile of a food blog exponentially. Abigail Knowles had sent a follow-up email with more detail. She loved Dinner by Dad’s charcoal drawings of his family. She loved that he was a mystery, but he also was not. She felt like she knew him, like she’d like to have a drink with him at a barbecue, and she was positive zillions of home cooks would feel the same.
“Don’t get excited,” Lu told herself. You had to be careful with good news—you had to hold it gently, like a glass ornament, or else it might shatter. Good news is for other people, Lu’s mother used to say grimly. (In her case it was usually true.)
Nancy had taken Chase and Sebastian out for bagels at the Old Post Office Bagel Shop. (In some ways it was turning out to be sometimes quite handy to have a mother-in-law around.) Lu sat outside on the front porch of the cottage for a few minutes, savoring the email, wondering what it would be like to call or text Jeremy and say, You’ll never believe what happened!
Just then Anthony rode up to the cottage next door on the rickety old bike she’d seen him depart on the evening before. She’d wondered where he was going but she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t felt cheerful and expansive the day before, because the boys had been cranky and it was hot and she hadn’t just gotten enough work done and she hadn’t just had an email from an agent in New York. But now she had Abigail Knowles tucked inside her like a present she hadn’t opened all the way. Lu called, “Hello! Hi!” waving until Anthony turned in her direction.
Anthony waved back. She couldn’t help noticing that he was wearing the same clothes she’d seen him in the day before. He always wore a gray shirt, but the shorts were plaid, and distinctive. In college they’d called this the Walk of Shame, when you returned home the next morning in the same clothes you’d left in. Was Anthony doing the Bike of Shame? Well, good for him if he was.
“What’s with the bike?” she called.
He made a face and walked toward her. “Car broke down. Had to get towed.” But he didn’t look too upset about it. He actually looked pretty happy. He was smiling more openly and more sincerely than she’d seen him do yet. When he smiled that way he looked so familiar—where had she seen his face before?
“You know,” she said, “I just can’t shake the feeling that I know you from somewhere.”
Almost imperceptibly, his smile changed. “I doubt it. I have one of those faces that people think they know. This happens to me all the time. I look like people’s uncle or their vet or the guy at the supermarket who gathers up the carts . . .”
“Noooo,” she said slowly. “Hang on, I’m really good at this, actually, I just need to concentrate.” Ex-boyfriend of one of the girls she lived with after college? Character actor in a Netflix show? Med school friend of Jeremy’s? No, no, and no. But wait. “Did you ever work as a bartender?”
He shook his head. “Never.”
“Hmmm.” She stepped closer and considered his features, squinting the way you might squint at a piece of art. She sighed. “It’s driving me crazy. What I feel like is not so much that I’ve seen you in person before, but that I’ve seen your picture. In a magazine or something.”
“Weird,” he said. His smile grew thinner. “I dunno. Listen, it’s been great chatting, but I’ve got to—”
“It was a newspaper!” she cried. “I’m positive it was a newspaper.”
He seemed
to deflate. The smile disappeared altogether.
“Is that it? Do you write a newspaper column or something?”
She had the sense he was engaged in an internal struggle. Finally he pointed to the two rocking chairs on the porch and said, “Mind if I sit down?”
“Of course not. Please, help yourself.” She gestured toward the chairs, and when he was seated she sat in the other one. They both began to rock slowly, like an elderly married couple.
He said, “I’m going to tell you something. But you have to swear you won’t tell anyone else.”
“Yes!” she said. Someone else with a secret; here was a kindred spirit. “I swear. You saved the life of my child. We are bound together forever.”
Chapter 21
Anthony
The New York Times
MacSimon Brown has announced that it is scrapping plans to print 250,000 copies of Anthony Puckett’s second novel, Simon’s Rock, after it was discovered that passages in the book were lifted directly from a little-known novel published in 1951 by the Irish writer Kieran O’Dwyer.
Anthony Puckett, whose debut novel, A Room Within, spent thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list nearly five years ago, was set to release his much-anticipated second novel in June. He is also the author of a book of short stories, The Temptation of Adam.
Mr. Puckett is the son of mega-bestselling thriller writer Leonard Puckett, whose novels have been translated into more than forty languages and have sold at least 200 million copies worldwide.
Charles Graydon, head of MacSimon Brown, said in a statement that the company “takes this matter very seriously. We were very much looking forward to the opportunity to promote Mr. Puckett’s second novel under our auspices and we are greatly saddened to learn that we will no longer have the opportunity to do so.”
Some industry watchers have speculated that the pressure to produce a second book that would sell as well as Mr. Puckett’s debut—perhaps propelling Mr. Puckett into the stratosphere currently occupied by his father—placed undue strain on Mr. Puckett and may have factored into his decision to plagiarize. Bestselling debut novels are notoriously difficult to follow up. The author of the 2009 bestseller The Help, Kathryn Stockett, was said to be working on her second novel as long ago as 2012, and has yet to publish it.
Others in the publishing industry took a more sanguine approach to the accusations. “I bet if you checked twenty books you’d find that at least six of them contained some sort of plagiarism,” said Shelly Salazar, a freelance book publicist based in Manhattan who claims to have worked with several top-selling authors. “Maybe seven. I mean, seriously? Simon’s Rock is an amazing book. Amazing. And Anthony Puckett wrote almost every word of it himself.”
“Some degree of plagiarism ought to be considered part of the publishing process,” said Richard Posner, a former judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and author of The Little Book of Plagiarism. Posner acknowledged that the practice is more rampant in the academic world than in the world of fiction. “Academics are particularly concerned with and prone to plagiarism,” said Posner. “It can be difficult to publish in academia without drawing on previously published work.” For novelists, the practice of plagiarism is both more unusual and more difficult to refute when discovered, if, as in the case of Mr. Puckett, exact sentences and paragraphs are copied word for word.
In the end, the copied passages add up to a little less than 1,200 words of a 120,000-word book, but that number will prove little help to Mr. Puckett, who, despite numerous attempts, did not return calls seeking comments. The publishing house declined to disclose how much of Mr. Puckett’s well-publicized advance, said to be in the two-million-dollar range, the author was asked to return. Thomas P. Campbell, a Manhattan-based attorney who specializes in cases of plagiarism, speculates that MacSimon Brown will want to recoup most, if not all, of the advance.
To some in the industry, Puckett’s situation recalls that of Kaavya Viswanathan, who, in 2004, as a seventeen-year-old, received an advance reported to be $500,000 for a two-book deal for two young adult novels. When excessive similarities were later found between her work and that of an already published book by Megan McCafferty, her publisher pulled the first book and canceled the contract for the second. Viswanathan claimed that although she had read McCafferty’s books, any similarities between the two were subconscious.
The elder Mr. Puckett, whose fifty-ninth novel, The Thrill of the Chase, is due out in June, could not be reached for comment. The estate of Mr. O’Dwyer, who died in 1998 in Castlebar, County Mayo, Ireland, also had no comment on the charges. The book in question, There Comes a Time, O’Dwyer’s fifth and final novel, sold fewer than 5,000 copies worldwide. It is not known how Mr. Puckett might have become familiar with the work of Mr. O’Dwyer, whose popularity, though considerable at its height, was mainly confined to his native country.
It is also not known publicly how the plagiarism was discovered. Calls to Leonard Puckett’s publishing house went unanswered.
Along with the article, they’d published Anthony’s author photo, in which he was leaning against a distressed piece of wood, perhaps meant to resemble the wall of an old barn. He was wearing a collared shirt, one button casually open, and he looked smug. In fact, he looked sort of like an asshole. He was smiling. Which was fine, of course, for a book jacket photo, but definitely not for a photo to go alongside an article detailing his shame and humiliation. Anthony hadn’t even wanted to use that photo on the book jacket. He’d preferred the photo that had appeared on the jacket of A Room Within, in which he looked more somber, more literary and pensive. But Cassie had insisted on a new photo; she’d insisted on the smile. “You’re a different person now than you were then,” she’d said. “You’re a star, Anthony! You need to play the part.” She’d called his look “approachable.”
Looking at the photo now made him feel nauseated. It didn’t even help him to write his feelings down in novelistic form, though he tried it anyway. Anthony Puckett could see right through his stupid fucking Cheshire grin, all the way to the black heart that lay beneath.
Part 3
July
Chapter 22
Joy
One of Joy’s suppliers, who was supposed to send fifty pounds of butter from a Vermont dairy farm, had missed the ferry, and Joy was in a minor panic. An image of Bridezilla loomed; before that wedding, she had several other large orders to fill. She tried to keep her cool with the supplier—she usually built in an extra day on either end for emergencies, the way you had to when you were an islander. But still she was incensed, and she let the manager of the dairy farm know it. Geoffrey Billings, his name was.
“I’ll make it up to you, Joy,” Geoffrey was saying. “You know we really value your business. I’ll see what we can pull together for the very next shipment.”
Joy had never met Geoffrey Billings, and when she talked to him on the phone, which she did often, she imagined him in farmer’s overalls, freshly emerged from his stool in the milking shed. Of course, all of the milking was done by machines, and Geoffrey was probably sitting in an office, surrounded by invoices and coffee cups and pictures of his grandkids at a swim meet, no more an actual farmer than Joy was.
“And I value your products, Geoff,” said Joy. It was true. If you put the word Vermont in front of the word butter, your pies instantly tasted better. Put organic in front of Vermont: even better, and they cost more. “But this can’t happen again. Not in the summertime.”
Sometimes when she heard herself on the phone like this, strict and businesslike, she thought of her father, who had spent most of her childhood chewing out somebody for something—the compressor that didn’t arrive, the pipe bender he was overcharged for. It was funny how you could think you were leaving your past behind when part of it always traveled right along with you. A stowaway.
“I’ll figure this out, Joy,” Geoff said. “Give me ten minutes, I’ll call you back.”<
br />
“Fine. I’ll be here for twenty minutes,” said Joy sternly and untruthfully. (She was going to be in her office all afternoon.)
Her text noise sounded. She had put on the bird chirp because she thought it would be peaceful and relaxing. But really it was startling. Her startle morphed into a smile when she saw the text was from Anthony. Are you free later today?
She started to text back, What do you have in mind? But tone didn’t translate in text, so that might come off as coquettish. Thinking about two nights ago, she actually started to blush. That was the Irish side of her, her mother’s legacy—the Portuguese side didn’t blush.
The day before, Anthony brought her flowers and left them with Maggie. Dustin had never, ever brought Joy flowers. Not even once. On their wedding day he and two of his band buddies were supposed to stop by the florist to pick up the order Joy’s mother had placed and paid for, and even that he couldn’t manage. They’d been given a funeral arrangement by mistake and didn’t even notice.
Invoices, Joy told herself. While you wait for Geoff Billings to call you back you need to think about invoices. You don’t think about Anthony. Who did she think she was, starting up a relationship with a recently separated stranger? After work she had to walk Pickles and check in with Bridezilla’s mother and stop by the grocery store for orange juice and call Holly back and figure out dinner for Maggie. Joy wasn’t free, not at all. She ignored the text.
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