We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver Read Free Book Online

up tomorrow to fly to Madrid and try to discourage you from meeting me at the airport three weeks later. Maybe once or twice. Not over and over.”
    “You could if you had to.”
    “Eva. You know and I know. You don’t have to.”
    I twisted. You were so close up; I felt hot, and, between your elbows, caged. “We’ve been through this—”
    “Not often. Your travel guides are a runaway success. You could hire college students to do all the grubbing around in flophouses that you do yourself. They already do most of your research, don’t they?”
    I was vexed; I’d been through this. “If I don’t keep tabs on them, they cheat. They say they’ve confirmed that a listing is still good, and don’t bother and go get slammed. Later it turns out the B&B has changed hands and is riddled with lice, or it’s moved to a new location. I get complaints from cross-country cyclists who have ridden a hundred miles to find an insurance office instead of a hard-earned bed. They’re furious, as they should be. And without the boss lady looking over their shoulder, some of those students will take kickbacks. AWAP’s most valuable asset is its reputation—”
    “You could hire someone else to do spot checks, too. So you’re going to Madrid tomorrow because you want to. There’s nothing awful about that except that I wouldn’t, and I couldn’t. You know that when you’re gone I think about you all the time? On the hour I think about what you’re eating, who you’re meeting—”
    “But I think about you, too!”
    You laughed, and the chuckle was congenial; you weren’t trying to pick a fight. You released me, rolling onto your back. “Horseshit, Eva. You think about whether the falafel stand on the corner will last through the next update, and how to describe the color of the sky. Fine. But in that case, you must feel differently about me than I do about you. That’s all I’m getting at.”
    “Are you seriously claiming that I don’t love you as much?”
    “You don’t love me in the same way. It has nothing to do with degree. There’s something—you save out,” you groped. “Maybe I envy that. It’s like a reserve tank or something. You walk out of here, and this other source kicks in. You putter around Europe, or Malaysia, until it finally runs low and you come home.”
     
    Yet in truth what you had described was closer to my pre-Franklin self. I was once an efficient little unit, like one of those travel toothbrushes that folds into a box. I know I tend to over-romanticize those times, though in the early days especially I had a fire under me. I was a kid, really. I’d initially gotten the idea for Wing and a Prayer halfway through my own first trip to Europe, for which I’d brought way too little cash. This notion of a bohemian travel guide gave me a sense of purpose in what was otherwise disintegrating into one long cup of coffee, and from then on I went everywhere with a tattered notebook, recording rates for single rooms, whether they had hot water or the staff spoke any English or the toilets backed up.
    It’s easy to forget, now that AWAP has attracted so much competition, but in the mid-sixties globe-trotters were pretty much at the mercy of The Blue Guide , whose target audience was middle-aged and middle class. In 1966, when the first edition of Western Europe on a Wing and a Prayer went into a second printing almost overnight, I realized that I was onto something. I like to portray myself as shrewd, but we both know I was lucky. I couldn’t have anticipated the backpacking craze, and I wasn’t enough of an amateur demographer to have taken deliberate advantage of all those restless baby boomers coming of age at once, all on Daddy’s dime in an era of prosperity, but all optimistic about how far a few hundred dollars would take them in Italy and desperate for advice on how to make a trip Dad never wanted them to take in the first place last as long as possible. I mostly reasoned that the next