Thief of Words Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the earth.”
    Most days it took Annie twenty minutes from the time she rolled out of bed until she was out the door. This morning, Wednesday morning, Annie was still playing Barbie doll with herself forty-five minutes after she’d put on the concealer.
    She stood backwards to her bedroom mirror, holding a small mirror before her eyes. She wanted to see if her butt looked big in a pair of charcoal linen pants. On her bed lay three other pairs of pants and two skirts, all of which had failed the butt test.
    She knew she was being stupid. Just pick something, she told herself. You’ll be sitting down; he won’t even see your butt. Suppose he did, though? And suppose he was really as terrific as Laura had said and she showed up in something that announced, “I have saddlebags.”
    With her eyes still focused on the small mirror, Annie took two steps to see how the pants moved when she did. Okay, so she was being stupid, the truth was she was having fun. She’d never been on a blind date before, and now that she’d broken the journalist barrier, she was getting more excited about the notion.
    “Looks like Richard Dreyfuss or Steven Spielberg,” Laura had said. Well, that’s promising, she thought, I’ve had a crush on Richard Dreyfuss since
The Goodbye Girl.
The playful tone of Jack DePaul’s e-mails was promising, too. She liked that he wanted to be surprised when they met. “Why have preconceptions?” he’d written. It was a good beginning.
    Then it struck her—this really was a beginning. Wednesday, May 29: the first day of the Dating Journalists Era, Part Deux. No one knew where it would lead. The lunch could be horrible— nowadays, Richard Dreyfuss looked like a paunchy sofa salesman (and there was that
People
magazine story about his rehab). It could be wonderful—she pictured Dreyfuss walking toward the
Close Encounters
spaceship. Either way, some kind of relationship was going to start today. And if it didn’t, apparently there was a whole newsroom of men to think about.
    She smoothed down the sides of her charcoal pants and brushed back her hair with her fingers. She thought about her relationships past. How less than a year after she left the
Commercial-Appeal
in disgrace, she’d met Thomas Harrington Boxer III, or “Trip” (for triple), eventually her husband, eventually her ex.
    She’d felt like damaged goods, and Trip, six feet of steadiness and solidity, seemed like someone she could hang on to through every storm. Someone who would stay. Unlike her father, Milt Hollerman. Unlike Andrew Binder.
    It took her years to realize Trip was never there to leave.
    At first she thought he was the opposite of her father. She called it the Anti-Milt theory. Trip seemed to be everything her father wasn’t—responsible, loving, caring, hearing. But it turned out that Trip out-Milted Milt, right down to hearing loss.
    Whereas Milt Hollerman had lost his hearing ducking mortar shells in World War II, Trip’s diminished auricularity resulted from too much skeet shooting and duck hunting as a boy. And what Annie had mistaken for steadiness turned out to be a deep coldness that made her father’s inept attempts at affection seem inspired. Annie’s mother called Trip “the Cardboard Box.”
    To add insult to injury, Trip was even cheaper than her father, though Milt had an excuse—he could never make a living. Trip, on the other hand, had been a highly paid lawyer before he retired at age forty-six to live off what he called his “welfare checks,” the $400,000 he received annually from the family’s pharmaceutical business.
    Despite his wealth, he always frowned when Annie came back from Sutton Place Gourmet with a bag full of cardamom seeds to put in their morning coffee. “I admit it tastes better,” Trip would say, “but at two dollars an ounce, I just don’t think it’s worth it. That’s almost a hundred dollars a year if we use two seeds a day.”
    Their marriage got sick and died long