Thief of Words Read Online Free PDF

before it arrived at the emergency room. On a mild fall Saturday morning when Annie picked up the phone to make a call and instead heard Trip arranging a tryst with their neighbor across the street, she realized she didn’t care. She wasn’t angry, sad, or even hurt. She felt nothing but the sudden urge to buy as many cardamom seeds as she could find.
    When Trip went to meet his paramour, Annie went to Sutton Place Gourmet. With their Platinum Visa, she charged $347—the largest sale of cardamom seeds ever, the salesgirl told her. She drove back to their Bethesda home, packed three suitcases, and left one of the four large plastic bags from Sutton Place on their kitchen counter with the following note: “Trip, here’s something to remember me by, Annie.”
    That’d been two years ago. She was pushing forty-five now, and her hormones were shouting “Last chance” so loud, all her body wanted to do was procreate. But other than the energy analyst, there hadn’t been anyone around to make Mother Nature think she was trying. And Mother Nature wanted her to try again. Maybe this Jack DePaul would be the answer. Or maybe he’d be an arrogant jerk or maybe he’d be boyishly charming or…
    The possibilities were limitless.

C HAPTER 7
    A t 12:15 that Wednesday afternoon, Jack DePaul parked his maroon Pathfinder in the empty parking lot of the Baltimore Museum of Art. Inside, there was no one by the entrance to Donna’s with fiery hair, just a guy wearing a blue-and-white seersucker and a bad combover.
    The last time Jack had been on a blind date was in high school. Thirty-five years later and he was still feeling nervous and goofy. He took a deep breath and told himself to relax. To kill time he went to the museum store. He circumnavigated the handcrafted earrings and painted silk scarves and found himself by the art books.
    Thinking about hair, Jack picked up a twenty-pound coffee-table book called
The Pre-Raphaelites
and began thumbing through. Dante Rossetti’s women were there, in abundance. Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris, Alexa Wilding— all those models (and wives and lovers) Rossetti had turned into pouty icons of pseudo-medievalism. One hundred and fifty years later they were still sexy, with their fog-fed complexions and their great waterfalls of hair cascading down in colors of copper, wheat, and polished heartwood. Rossetti and his earnest band of young Victorian rebels had gotten it just right—the sleepy, sensuous look of passion about to be uncaged.
    Jack looked at Lizzie Siddal as Dante’s Beatrice. Her ecstasy did not appear religious. Wavy locks of sunset hair spilled down her shoulders like lava. If this Hollerman woman looks anything like Elizabeth Siddal, Jack thought, I’ll give Laura my next three paychecks. Hell, make it the next ten paychecks.
    He checked his watch: 12:20. He was starting to turn back to the Pre-Raphaelites when something caught his eye. By the front of the store, looking at the racks of arty postcards, stood a woman with her back to him. She wore a black linen jacket and loose charcoal pants. A green suede bag was slung over her shoulder. Flowing down to the middle of her back were curls the color of chestnut, if the chestnut was lit by a summer sun at, say, 7:30 in the evening.
    She pulled a card from one of the racks. Just as it began to seep into Jack’s brain that she might be Annie, she walked off in the direction of Donna’s. Jack rushed to the card racks and peeked around the corner. The woman was leaning on the hostess stand. Jack still couldn’t see her face. She was turned toward the restaurant and the sculpture garden beyond the tables.
    He stepped back into the store, out of sight, and looked into a small mirror with a wildly colored Haitian frame. He never thought it would happen to him, all that white hair. But then again, he never thought any of it would happen to him. That his marriage would shatter and fall. That the image of a long white