Free Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos Page B

while it might have been broken and sad, was clearly love.
    “No?”
    “You sound surprised,” said Pen. “Do you know her?”
    “Oh, no,” said Selena. “But the illustrations and the words, they’re so wonderfully matched, so one with each other. It’s surprising to hear that they’re not close.”
    Pen felt confused, trying to make sense of Selena’s pronouns. Then she looked down at the cover of the book again and saw what she had missed the first time. There, below Will’s name: “Illustrations by Charlotte Tully Wadsworth.” Pen read the name again, tracing it with her finger. What a wondrous thing.
    Pen had gone back and paged through the book, then, through each glowing, intricate, color-drenched illustration, and had stopped at the picture of the monster, mid-transformation, the dandelion fluff touched by the sun into a kind of filigree, each feathery filament of each tiny blowing seed parachute precisely shining, the whole picture full of an almost palpable lightness. Pen looked, next, at the mother’s watching face in the kitchen window. The illustration had blurred, as Pen’s eyes filled. She smiled. If Charlotte Tully Wadsworth had walked into the bookstore right then, Pen would have hugged her, something she had never done in real life.
    “You’re right,” she’d said to Selena, nodding, her fingertips resting on the beautiful thing that Will and his mother had made together. “Something must have changed a lot for her to be able to do this.”
    Selena capped her Sharpie with a flourish. “Good. Better than good. The world could use more of that, couldn’t it? Kids and parents getting closer, instead of breaking apart and losing each other.” Then Selena pressed the back of her hand to her mouth for a few seconds and shook her head. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, dear heart,” she said. “I wasn’t talking about you and your dad, who were as close as any people could be. I didn’t mean—”
    Pen reached out and squeezed Selena’s hand. “I know what you meant. And it is better than good. That’s just exactly what it is.”
    A FTER P EN HAD SPENT TEN MINUTES INTERCEPTING DIRTY LOOKS from her fellow diners, including one from a child in an Elmo T-shirt who feigned gagging himself with his finger, and watching Kiki Melloy, nonstop talker and bestselling mystery author, try to simultaneously talk nonstop and cut her enormous rib eye without losing her grip on the unlit cigarette chopsticked between two fingers of her left hand, she said, “Kiki, maybe you should just put that thing down.”
    Kiki’s gaze became patient and long-suffering. “Penny, honey, no one ever said personal protests were easy. Ask Dr. King about that.”
    Kiki’s mysteries featured amateur detective Hildy Breen, an occasionally clairvoyant exotic small animal vet (fire-bellied toads, sugar gliders, bearded dragons, and the like), living in an adorable, if corpse-riddled, southern town. People categorized her books as “cozy mysteries” but there was nothing cozy about Kiki, not Kiki’s exterior anyway. Her interior was quite a different matter. She had been one of Pen’s first clients and had teased out of Pen the whole story of Patrick and Tanya and of how, after a long talk with Tanya, and after talks with other parents who had talked with Tanya, the headmaster at Pen’s school had suggested that she take leave from teaching to deal with her “disheveled personal life.” Kiki’s rapid-fire, profanity-laced excoriation of Tanya, Patrick, the headmaster, and all of “Purifuckingtanical, hypofuckingcritical, soy-slurping, 100 percent testicle-free upper-middle-class America” had caused Pen to laugh out loud for the first time in months.
    Pen ignored the Dr. King remark, along with Kiki’s calling her “Penny.” Calmly, she said, “All I’m saying is that more of your outrageously expensive steak is flying off the table than is going into your mouth, for which your circulatory system is probably