Chapter Text
“Hello?”
“Well, hey there! Glad I caught you. You in the middle of anything?”
“Ted? No, I'm not …wait, has something happened? Why are you calling?”
“I was gonna say just to hear your dulcet tones, but they’re not all that dulcet just now. More on the craggy side of things. Everything hunky dory?”
“You’ve caught me out. I was having a nap.”
“Shoot, I didn’t mean to disturb you. I thought late afternoon in London Town would be a pretty safe bet, unless you had Hazel, but I don’t know if you got back into the same routine after your book tour and all, and I thought I’d probably gotten it mixed up at some point anyway, so that was gonna be a wild draw no matter what. Whatcha doin’ napping? Now you got me worried – creaky voice, napping in the middle of the afternoon, sounds a lot like a sick day.”
“I’m not sick.”
“…”
“…”
“Oh, that’s all you’re gonna give me. Not sick.”
“Sounds like you have enough energy for both of us.”
“If you wanna get back to your nap, I won’t keep you!”
“No, I’m up. I wasn’t really asleep anyway. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“See, a coupla weeks ago I settled into my own place here, found a nice house a few minutes from Michelle so it’s easy for us with Henry, got the utilities all going, figured out which faucets were leaky, all that. Turns out that it was cheaper to get my wifi and all if I packaged it with cable and telephone, and I tried to tell ‘em I don’t need a landline these days, who even has one, like, do they even sell those anymore other than in antique stores? But I love a deal, so I just said let’s do it, do the triple play. But I also hate to waste a thing, so I was sitting here, thinking about those poor electrons going nowhere in my wall, and next time I was at my mom’s I poked around and found *this* thing, and *bam*, done deal.”
“That doesn’t really answer the question.”
“Yeah. I guess the answer is just to chat. How’re you doing?”
“I’m recovering nicely.”
“Recovering? From what?”
“Book tour, Ted.”
“Didn’t you have fun?”
“As much fun as it’s possible to have on book tour.”
“See, I woulda thought it’d be a blast. You just go around, everyone says nice things about you and the book, you get to talk about how smart you were in writing it –”
“That has an uncanny lack of resemblance to the thing itself.”
“Well, tell me about it.”
“How’s Kansas?”
“You don’t always get to ask the questions, you know.”
“Book tour is like running a marathon on a treadmill facing a wall.”
“I’m afraid that metaphor is too slick for me to untangle.”
“It’s a mindless endurance test. An endless stream of the same questions and comments, during which you have to pretend they’re new and interesting and you haven’t given the same answer a thousand times before. Half the questions are more about you than the book, a healthy handful besides have nothing to do with the book you actually wrote, and most of the audience questions are comments from people who think they would’ve written a better book than you.”
“Huh—”
“You have about thirty seconds to acclimatize to each city before you’re whisked off to another, and any other downtime you might have is crammed with podcasts, radio, the occasional TV spot by this point in my career, and answering endless interview questions over email when you're bleary-eyed in your hotel room at one in the morning wishing you had a per diem to cover the whiskey you need at the end of the day.”
“That sounds –”
“By the end of it, you’re a hollow-eyed shadow of your former self, having forgotten the taste of strawberries.”
“...So I guess I shouldn’t start pitching you on a tour of the States, huh?”
“Aurghh.”
“Solid no. Makin’ a note.”
“Tragically, I think a small tour lies in my future. A U.S. publisher picked up the rights. It comes out sometime next year, I think.”
“Oh, yeah?!”
"I imagine I'll have to pop over to New York. Probably Boston. They like books there, allegedly. DC as well. Somewhere in California while I'm there? Augh. God."
"See, and I thought ranting about the tour got your energy up, but now you sound tuckered out again."
"I may have ranted, but I was doing it reclined on my couch."
"Still, a U.S. tour sounds like fun."
"I look forward to it like a root canal. Your country may be a superpower and a market heavyweight, but the real question is: can anyone there actually read? It's unclear to me."
"Well, there's a few of us."
"...sorry."
"How long you been back from the tour?"
"Two days."
"Have you gotten a good night's rest? Nice meal? Oh, shoot, am I interrupting your much-needed quiet time?"
"It's fine, Ted. You're not interrupting anything. I just get like this after a tour."
"Get like what?"
"Why did you call me?"
"I wanted to chat."
"Surely it's not worth the long distance."
"You know, even on a landline, long distance don't cost what it used to. Should I not give you a call?"
"No, I don't mind."
"Well, that's good. 'cause I'm gonna do it again sometime. I'm working out a schedule. I miss you. All y'all. I miss everyone."
"Do you."
"One of the boys Henry plays soccer with—sorry, it's soccer here, I'm backslidin' like you wouldn't believe—his family is hosting an exchange student for the year. She's from France, and we got to chattin' at the last match, and I said how hard it must be, what a brave and interesting thing she was doing, going away from everyone she knows for a year. And she's only fifteen. She said, yes, she was very brave and interesting—"
"Ha! So fucking French."
"But that it must be much easier for her than it was when I was her age—which was a bit of a K-O, the way she looked at me—because these days everyone's just a click away. And she said wasn't there anyone I loved who was far away? And did they vanish from my life?"
"Hrm."
"I don't want to let y'all vanish just because I came back here, is all."
"Well. You have my number."
"You don't mind being on the rota?"
"Not at all."