Free Gemini by Carol Cassella Page A

bottle of Zinfandel, and Charlotte noticed how long and slender his fingers were, the hands of a pianist or painter, like they were intended to have a purpose all their own. Designed, perhaps, for when the job of writing involved a quill rather than a keyboard. She told him a little about her job at Beacon, her house, which she had just bought and was trying to remodel herself after a mishmash job by prior owners. She told him about growing up in Seattle in a family of doctors (her mother a pathologist, her father a surgeon) and how sometimes she wondered if she’d ever given any other occupation a chance. Her brother, Will, had proposed to his wife in college on the condition that she, too, go to medical school, declaring it the only way to stomach the average, gory, Reese-family-dinner conversation. They were both pediatricians now.
    Charlotte did not tell Eric about Ricky, the boyfriend she had just broken up with, or the fact that one month earlier she and her sister-in-law, Pamela, had lit a match to Ricky’s last and best present to Charlotte, a ticket to Belize, where Ricky was now staying in an oceanfront cottage with the girlfriend he’d originally left for Charlotte. All the better—Charlotte burned under tropical sun and hated how she looked in a bathing suit. She did, however, remind herself that she had sworn on the flames of that ticket that she had nothing more in her to give to a man, romantically at least, and at thirty-five planned to take her life forward alone. But even at the height of her anger she admitted that she hated Ricky more for the years she’d given up to him than for his deceit; she probably wouldn’t have dated him at age twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-eight. So it was herself she should be angry at, right? Regardless, it was only herself she could change.
    By the time they finished two tiramisus she knew a lot less about Eric than he knew about her. He’d been a mediocre student but a passionate reader. After college he’d taken a job writing for an airline throwaway, churning out articles about beaches in the airline’s small market, tips for getting through TSA, which terminals had the best burgers. Two years into it he put on a backpack, cashed in all of his accumulated frequent-flier miles, and got hooked on traveling for a while. He’d done pretty well as a travel writer for a few more years and then the Human Genome Project took off. One night he drank too much tequila and wrote an editorial for the New York Times about the risks of knowing your own genetic code, the impossible-to-answer question of whether a deadly diagnosis would change how you live. His tequila-enhanced spin caught the eye of an editor at Nature who commissioned an article, which got noticed by a publisher who bought Eric’s first book. There was a hesitancy about the way he told Charlotte that story, a reluctance to answer her questions about what had sparked his passions, for travel or science or, in fact, for writing at all. It was a modesty she found comforting and trustworthy, but then she reminded herself that it was natural to look for those traits after dealing with Ricky’s ego for more than a year, so she switched to less probing topics. Thus, it was no accident that Charlotte left the restaurant without a complete picture of Eric. But when she woke up the next morning her first thought was about a comment he’d made. He wanted to be a science writer, he’d said, because he’d lost faith in the public’s ability to objectively weigh data: too much zealous opinion, too much TV, too much unquestioned religion, too few questioning minds. It could have sounded bitter, but Eric relayed it like a parent gently tsk-tsking a lazy child, like such delinquency only made his job more critical.
    After they’d eaten he’d walked her back down to her aging Saab. “Haven’t seen one of these in a while,” he said.
    “Yeah. It runs. When it’s not in the shop. I should ditch it, but I’m