The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life by Camilla Gibb Page A

me?”
    â€œI don’t have a father any more.”
    â€œIs he dead?”
    â€œVanished.”
    â€œVanished? How does a father vanish?” he asked her.
    â€œPoof,” she said, and gestured with her hands—up in smoke.
    â€œIs that why you always look so sad?” he asked her.
    â€œI don’t know,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
    Saturdays were fast becoming the days when the world was different. Imagine if I actually lived here, she thought, looking at the walls of books in Andrew’s house. Imagine if I’d grown up here. Supposing I’d grown up in a rich, literary household rather than a silent and broken home—I’d be nothing like Emma Taylor at all. The books in Andrew’s house were worlds away from the sickly sweet trash she was used to tearing through. They were denser, heavier, older, and the more famous they were, the longer they took to read. Everything was slower, calmer, and quieter here.
    She read books on a long divan in front of French doors through which sunlight streamed and imagined she was the long-lost daughter of Bavarian aristocrats who had searched for her for years and finally brought her home. There were no neon lights in this wilderness. She imagined herself a caterpillar girl in a garden full of vegetables and knew she was falling in love.
    Andrew played the piano in a room in the near distance. Late in the afternoon he would find Emma lying in the very spot he had left her hours before, engrossed in the pages of the same book. Emma stretched her limbs and smiled at him and asked him to tell her about Truth. Andrew had introduced her to this big, elusive love of his life. He’d been reading about the properties of quarks named Strange, Charm, Up, Down, Beauty, and the as-yet-undiscovered sixth partner in all this—a little girl named Truth. Andrew wanted to spend his life in heroic pursuit of this elusive quark. He wanted to be the Little Bo Peep of the subatomic world. He dreamt of Geneva, where he hoped to one day smash atoms in a particle accelerator that straddles the border between Switzerland and France.
    Emma had no trouble inserting herself into his fantasy. She wondered if they would give her a job sweeping nuclear dust off the accelerator floor. She would be the Border collie guarding the five other sheep in the pen if he asked her to. She wanted to smell him, dusty, in bed beside her every night. That’s all she wanted. We don’t even have to talk, she thought to herself. Even if he just crashes into bed late in his lab coat and dirty shoes—I really don’t care—just as long as I can wake up to the smell of him every morning.
    â€œI suppose it would be time for tea,” she said playfully. She liked his strange rituals.
    â€œWhy, yes,” he said. “Spot on. I think you are instinctively British.”
    Emma pulled open all the cupboards in the kitchen looking for teacups like the ones on “Coronation Street.” She found them—all gilt-edged and frilly with saucers to match.
    â€œShall I be Mother?” Andrew asked, gesturing to pour.
    â€œAs long as that doesn’t mean I have to be Father,” Emma laughed, but her smile turned down as she realized the seriousness of what she’d just said. If Oliver could see her right now, he’d be shaking his head. Thinking: Christ, Emma, who do you think you are? What kind of pretence have you got yourself caught up in? Whose house is this? Looks like it belongs to some mercenary bastards who inherited a whack of cash from some decrepit aunt and haven’t had to work a fucking day in their lives.
    â€œOh, don’t, Emma,” Andrew said gently. “You were looking so happy. You’ve started to look so much happier than when I first saw you come into the library. You were so foul-tempered then.”
    â€œI’m happier now, especially on Saturdays,” she brightened, adding shyly,