Twilight Child - Softcover

Adler, Warren

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451145585 ISBN 13: 9780451145581

Publisher: New Amer Library, 1986

Synopsis

When Frances's husband dies and she remarries, her former in-laws attempt to obtain the right to visit their grandchild from a newly appointed family court judge

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FRANCES watched him as he stood in the patch of garden in the sweltering night, squinting into the grate on which the steaks sizzled, intense and absorbed in his task. In the airconditioned cool of the den, she sipped the martini he had mixed with scrupulous care. It was strange and bitter to her taste. Music spilled softly from the speakers. Mozart, he had said. She whispered the name and continued to watch him.

He wore a blue blazer, light gray flannels, and a floppy polka dot bow tie, which, in Dundalk, would have certainly seemed eccentric. But in the environment of this townhouse in Columbia, it was, she supposed, perfectly appropriate.

The candles he had lit in the den cast a flickering orange glow on the books, some helter-skelter, some standing like soldiers, in the paneled bookcases. On the walls were paintings, real paintings, not just prints. Mostly, they were splotches of deep colors in strange shapes. Abstract art, he had called them, expressing the hope that she loved them. She did not give him cause to think otherwise. It was all very wonderful and mysterious and she felt transported into an environment totally different from any she had ever known.

She had, in a way, expected this first formal date to be exactly as it was turning out. No, there were no disappointments. In her life, that was most unusual.

“I know it’s confusing.”

Those were his very first words to her, soft and considerate, yet unmistakably authoritative. It was, after all, his department and she was hired merely as a temporary to check input forms for some computer program, of which she understood little. He did not know, of course, that she was mortified by her failure. Nor could he see the symptoms of her agitation, the sudden tightness in her stomach, the tremors in her knee joints, the dryness in the roof of her mouth.

Patiently, like some kindly teacher, he had re-explained the process, and by the time he looked up at her, showing dark brown eyes with yellow flecks, her symptoms had disappeared.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she had whispered. She hadn’t expected the apology to be as abject as it must have sounded. Apparently, though, it struck a chord of sympathy in him, and later in the day he had stopped by her desk, looking over her shoulder until she felt the symptoms begin again.

“Now you got it,” he had told her. This time, the receding symptoms left anger in their wake. He is treating me like a child, she thought defensively. The way she sometimes treated Tray, her five-year-old, when he did something right after repeated failures.

“Thank you,” she had replied, wondering if he caught the tinge of sarcasm. It frightened her to think so, and she turned to look up at him and flash him a quick smile. In that instant, she sensed that he had, in some strange way, photographed her with his mind. It was so unexpected and illogical and ill-timed that she tried to force herself to deny it. But that didn’t stop her from thinking about it, and soon she simply dismissed it as a mirage.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Amer Library
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0451145585
• ISBN 13: 9780451145581
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English