Read Online I'd Know You Anywhere: A Novel by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online

elaborate sandwiches from deli roast beef and dark bread, chopping cornichons and putting them in brown mustard, then adding horseradish and a judicious sprinkling of salt and pepper.
    â€œI might not have everything Nonnie has, but I think I couldmake a fair approximation,” she said, taking a quick mental inventory of the refrigerator’s contents, calculating that butter pickles would approximate the experience Albie craved, which was more about the chopping and mixing, making an exciting ritual out of something mundane. Albie loved productions, and with a child as easily pleased as Albie, it seemed a shame not to try to meet his expectations. Especially now, when everything and anything she did antagonized Iso. “Mom, you’re breathing too loud,” she had said the other day in Trader Joe’s. “Loudly,” Eliza had corrected, then felt awful for using grammar to one-up her daughter. Not that it had worked.
    Albie put his hand in hers, as if the walk to the kitchen were a journey of miles. She wished it were, that he would stay this age for three, four years, then be nine for a decade or so, then spend another ten years being ten. But onetime graduate student of children’s literature that she was, she knew there was no spell, no magic, that could keep a child a child, or shield a child from the world at large. In fact, that was where the trouble almost always began, with a parent trying to outthink fate. Stay on the path. Don’t touch the spindle. Don’t speak to strangers. Don’t pick the rose.

8
    1985
    HE HAD GONE TOO FAR this time. Literally, too far. He had headed out Wednesday morning, telling himself he had no plans, then driven and driven until the landscape had changed, civilization coming at him all of a sudden. He would never get back in time for dinner now. And, although there were girls everywhere, they were never alone, but traveling in groups, gaggles. He stopped at a mall and almost became dizzy at the sight of all the girls there, girls with bare midriffs and short shorts. He leaned on the railing on the second floor, watching them move in lazy circles below, flit in and out of the food court, where they would briefly interact with the boys, then plunge back into themall proper. The boys looked baffled by these quicksilver girls. They were too immature, they couldn’t give these girls what they wanted.
    But neither could he, unless he got one alone, had a chance to sweet-talk her. He would go slow this time, real slow.
    He drove past a fenced swimming pool—that was a kind of water, wasn’t it?—stationed himself in the parking lot, stealing glances through the chain-link fence. The girls here seemed intertwined. Not actually touching but strung together by invisible threads, their limbs moving in lazy unison. They would flip on cue, sit up on cue, run combs through their hair at the same moment. Boys circled these girls, too, silly and deferential. They didn’t have a chance.
    He caught an older woman, a leathery mom, frowning at him, decided to move on.
    He had almost given up, was wondering how he would explain all the miles on the truck—he could fill the gas tank, but he couldn’t erase seventy, eighty, ninety miles from an odometer—when he saw the right girl. Tall, filled out, but walking as if her body was still new to her, as if she had borrowed it from someone else and had to give it back at day’s end, in good condition. She was on a sidewalk in a ghost town of a neighborhood, a place so empty and quiet that it felt like they were the last two people on earth. He stopped and—sudden inspiration—asked her for directions to the mall, although he knew his way back there. Her face wasn’t quite as pretty as he had hoped—Earl, the other mechanic back at his father’s place called this kind of girl a Butterface—but she had a serious expression that was very touching, as if she wanted to make