“Twenty-two. Not all of it at this station. I don’t think he’s been off the air longer than a few days since he started.” She was holding her clipboard tightly against her chest. Those long hands gripped the edges.
“Well, I was delighted when I heard he wanted a novelist on!” Otis said. “Usually if we’re lucky enough to do Randy Johnson’s show it’s a sports biography, or sometimes politics. I can’t remember ever bringing a fiction writer in before today. You should be proud,” he said to Jake. “You got Randy Johnson to read a novel!”
“Ah,” said the woman, Anna Williams. “You know, I wish I could promise you that he’s read the whole novel. He’s been briefed, obviously, but you’re right, Randy’s not what you’d call a natural reader of fiction. He gets what a huge thing Crib has become, though. He likes to be on top of a cultural phenomenon whether it’s a novel or a pet rock.”
Jake sighed. In the early weeks of the book’s publication he’d endured more than a few interviews with people who hadn’t read the book, and answering their basic questions—So what’s your book about?—presented the significant challenges of describing Crib without giving away the plot’s now infamous twist. By now, everyone seemed to know what his book was about, which had been a relief in more ways than one. Also, it wasn’t fun covering for somebody’s total unfamiliarity with your work while trying to sound pleasant and engaged yourself.
They went upstairs to the studio and found the host, Randy Johnson, in mid-interview with a state senator and her constituent, both highly exercised by a new regulation related to dogs and their waste. Jake watched Johnson, a large and hirsute man with a definite tendency to spit, expertly play these two antagonists against each other until the constituent, at least, was red in the face and the senator was threatening to get up and leave the room.
“Oh, now, you don’t want to do that,” said Johnson, who was definitely suppressing his own laughter. “Look, let’s take a call.”
The producer, Anna Williams, brought Jake a bottle of water. Her fingers, slipping past his, were warm, but the water was cool. He looked at her. She was pretty; very, undeniably pretty. He had not paused to consider the prettiness of a woman for a very long time. There had been a woman he’d met on Bumble the previous summer and gone out to dinner with a couple of times. Before that, a woman who taught statistics at SUNY Cobleskill. Before that, Alice Logan, the poet he’d met at Ripley, though that petered out when she headed south to Johns Hopkins at the end of the summer. She was tenured there now, Jake knew. She’d sent him a brief, congratulatory email when Crib made the New York Times bestseller list.
“He’s about finished with those two,” she said quietly.
When the commercial break began she led him to the seat the angry constituent had just vacated and held the earphones open for him. Randy Johnson was studying some papers and drinking from a KBIK mug. “Hang on,” he said, without looking up. “Hang on a minute.”
“Sure,” said Jake. He looked around for Otis, but Otis wasn’t nearby. Anna Williams took the other chair and put on her own headset. She gave him an encouraging smile.
“He has some good questions,” she said, sounding less than certain. Obviously, she had written the questions herself. The uncertainty, Jake supposed, was whether the host would stick to them.
Just before they went back on air, Johnson looked up and grinned. “How you doing. Jack, right?”
“Jake,” said Jake. He reached across to shake the host’s hand. “Thanks for having me on.”
Randy Johnson grinned. “This one”—he pointed at Anna—“gave me no choice.”
“Well,” Jake said, turning to her. Anna was looking down at her clipboard, pretending not to listen.
“Looks like a featherweight, but she’s a heavyweight when it comes to getting her way.”
“That’s probably what makes her a great producer,” Jake said, as if this complete stranger needed him to defend her.
“Five seconds,” said a voice in Jake’s ears.
“Okay!” Randy Johnson said. “Ready, all?”
Jake was, he supposed. By now he’d sat in any number of chairs just like this one, and smiled genially at any number of local blowhards. He listened to Randy Johnson opine about unleashed dogs on the streets of Seattle for a while, and then heard what he understood to be his own introduction. “Okay, so our next guest is probably the hottest writer in America at the moment. Am I talking about Dan Brown or John Grisham? You’re probably getting pretty excited out there, am I right?”
He glanced at the woman beside him. Her sharp jaw was set and her eyes down on the clipboard.
“Well, too bad. But let me ask you something. Who out there’s read a new book called The Crib? Sounds like it’s about a baby. Is it about a baby?”
The host was silent then. After a horrified moment, Jake realized he was expected to actually answer this question.
“Uh, it’s Crib, not The Crib. And nothing really to do with a baby. To ‘crib’ something means to steal it, or purloin it. And … thanks for having me on, Randy. We had a great event in Seattle last night.”
“Oh yeah? Where?”
He couldn’t remember the name of the actual hall. “Seattle Arts and Lectures. It was at the symphony. Gorgeous place.”
“Yeah? That’s big. How big is that place?”
Really? Jake thought. Now he was expected to answer trivia questions about the host’s own city? But in fact he knew the answer.
“About twenty-four hundred, I think. I met some amazing people.”
Beside him, Anna held up a piece of paper, but to the host, not to Jake. FULL NAME: JACOB FINCH BONNER it read.
Randy made a face. “Jacob Finch Bonner. What kind of name is that?”
The kind I got at birth, Jake thought. Except for the Finch, of course.
“Well, everyone calls me Jake. I have to admit to adding the ‘Finch’ myself. After Scout, Jem, and Atticus.”
“After who?”
It was so hard not to shake his head. He had to fight against it.
“Characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. It was my favorite novel when I was a child.”
“Oh. Yeah, I think I got out of reading that by watching the movie.” Here he interrupted himself with his own approving laughter. “So you got this hot first novel, everybody’s reading it. Tell us what it’s about, Jake Finch.”
Jake tried for a laugh of his own. It came out sounding far less natural. “Just Jake! Well, there are things in this book I don’t want to spoil for people who haven’t read it, so let’s just say it’s about a woman named Samantha who becomes a mother at a young age. Very young. Too young.”
“She was a naughty girl,” Randy commented.
Jake looked at him in some disbelief. “Well, not necessarily. But she sort of gives up her own life to have her child, and the two of them live together in a kind of isolated way, in the house Samantha herself grew up in. But they’re not close. And it gets worse between them as the daughter, Maria, becomes a teenager.”
“Oh, you mean it’s like my house,” he said delightedly.
Anna held up another sign. MORE THAN 2 MILL SOLD, it said. And under that: SPIELBERG DIRECTING MOVIE.
“So, Jake! I hear Steven Spielberg is making it into a movie. How’d you hook the big one?”
It was a relief, at least, to move the subject away from himself and even his book. Jake talked a bit about the film, and what a fan of Spielberg he’d always been. “It’s amazing to me that he connected so powerfully with this story.”