Free A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer Page A

ostensibly reading the paper and drinking espresso, but in reality watching for Iris or her car. After an hour of this maddening activity, during which he is unable to read more than a few a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r
    headlines, and the coffee tastes like scorched ink, he takes Ruby back home with a cup of latte and a cranberry muffin for Kate, who, to his surprise, is awake and dressed when they return.
    “Where was everybody?” she asks.
    “Breakfast,” he says, handing her the takeout bag.
    “What did people eat in pre-muffin America?” Kate asks, peering into the bag. She notices Ruby, whose mouth is ringed with chocolate and whose T-shirt is spotted with it. Kate looks questioningly at Daniel.
    “That’s what happens to little girls whose mothers sleep late,” he says, surprising himself with the bite of his own voice.
    “I want to play with Nelson,” Ruby says.
    It seems strange to Daniel: as his heart swells from the added freight of love and desire, it becomes in its fullness less and less substantial, until it is like a feather in a stiff wind, unpredictably blowing this way and that, spiraling up, plunging down, rocketing sideways at the slightest provocation—the lucky-sounding ring of the phone, the melancholy shift of the afternoon light, the hum of an oncoming car. He has resisted all morning the treacherous impulse to plant in Ruby the idea that she and Nelson get together today, but now, God bless her, she has come up with the idea all on her own, and his spirits soar.
    “I don’t think so,” Kate says. “Nelson’s father is home and that’s their private time over at Nelson’s house.”
    Ruby looks at Kate, squinting, wringing her little hands, as she tries to think of some counterargument to this. But the combination of Kate’s professional needs and temperament has made the concept of “private time” sacred. Still, Ruby cannot hide her disappointment, and she even manages to enter into a brief, unsuccessful negotiation, during which Daniel stands transfixed, unable to shake the feeling that his happiness hangs in the balance.
    In the end, Kate prevails. Not only can Ruby not go to Nelson’s house, but Nelson cannot come to hers. And when Ruby counters with all she has left—“Then I’m going to be so bored”—Kate says that maybe they can all go to Lubochevsky Farms, where the enterprising owners
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    have devised a way to get tourists and even some of the locals to pay for the privilege of harvesting the annual raspberry and apple crops. Daniel is taken aback by Kate’s suggestion. He cannot imagine her climbing the rickety stepladders, filling the flimsy baskets with apples, enduring the sunlight and the hefty autumnal bees. And then what? Eat the apples? In three years of knowing her he has never seen her take a bite of an apple.
    No. There is only one explanation. She is concocting this little outing as a way of roping him in, and when Daniel realizes this he reacts like someone jumping away from an onrushing car.
    “I have to go to the office,” he says. He feels the desperation of a gambler: if he can just sit at the table, then maybe he can catch a card.
    “On a Saturday?”
    “Sorry. It happens.” He is experiencing that bicameral lunacy of a man with a secret life; he is talking to Kate, making his excuses, arrang-ing his features in a way that would suggest regret. He is already gone.
    “I need to work, too,” she says. “I’ve got two O. J. articles going, and both are due.”
    “What is with you and that case? I thought you were a novelist.”
    “He butchered his wife and might end up walking. I know we like to cheer for the African-American side, but there is a question of justice at stake. I’m sure even Iris Davenport would agree with that.”
    It is unnerving to hear her say Iris’s name, and he shifts his eyes, afraid for a moment that he might give himself away, though he is beginning to wonder if there is much secrecy to his secret life. He