Nanette has forgotten all about Sandra Tackett, which seems almost impossible given the circumstances, but true nonetheless. In the post-Alex confusion, she doesn’t forget that Sandra Tackett exists; she just forgets that they have given her a copy of The Bubblegum Reaper and that Sandra has probably finished reading it by now, unless she is a terribly slow turner of pages. Maybe Nanette forgot that there is still a mystery to solve. She suddenly wonders what Sandra thinks of Booker’s novel and if the old classmate of Nigel’s is able to identify the real-life inspirations for the main characters. Does she know for whom Booker wrote T.B.R.? It seems to matter a lot again, all of a sudden, sitting here with Oliver. Like finding a bread crumb in the woods after months of wandering lost and suddenly remembering that bread crumbs can lead one out of the woods to safety, if only in fairy tales. Nanette is beginning to think that her life is a fairy tale—that fairy tales are much more real than we originally suspect when we first read them as children.
“Nanette hasn’t even really thought about Sandra Tackett for a while,” Nanette says. “But now that you mention her, Nanette should probably drop in on—”
“We could go this afternoon.”
“No car.”
“I have a bike. You have a bike. And we have legs to pedal!”
There is no end to this kid’s optimism, Nanette thinks, and wonders if that is a good or bad fact.
Wild optimism puts a big target on your forehead.
Oliver and Nanette ride their bikes through the snow and ice, which proves to be slowgoing and very cold, but somehow they manage to reach Sandra Tackett’s home. Their pants are soaked with slush, and Nanette’s socks are wet, too. When she sees herself reflected in the glass of the storm door, her lips are blue.
They ring the doorbell and are shocked when Booker—wearing nothing but an undershirt and boxers—opens Sandra’s front door and then immediately slams it in their faces.
“Was that who I think it was?” Oliver says, because he has never officially met Nigel Wrigley Booker, but has seen pictures of the faux-reclusive fiction writer.
“Um, yeah,” Nanette says, smiling ear to ear. “It most definitely was. And he apparently wasn’t wearing clothes, which is very interesting.”
“Does his not wearing clothes mean that he is getting it on with Sandra Tackett?” Oliver asks.
“Most likely—yes,” Nanette says.
After the doorbell is rung five or so times, Sandra appears wearing a silk Japanese-looking bathrobe—a kimono, maybe?—and says, “Hello, children, I’m afraid you’ve caught me at an inconvenient time. Where have you been for so long? I finished the book many weeks ago, but you never came back and, well, your timing today honestly couldn’t be worse. I’m sorry, but I simply cannot speak now.”
“Booker answered just a second ago, and he was in his underwear,” Nanette says. For some reason she remembers a fitting expression from Shakespeare’s Othello, which she just read in her senior literature class. Her rather boring and average teacher, Mr. Sherman, did not offer an explanation when they read it aloud, and so the joke went over most of her classmates’ heads, but Nanette had laughed and jotted it down in her notebook for future use. “Are you two perhaps ‘making the beast with two backs’?”
“What’s the beast with two backs?” Oliver asks.
Nanette smiles as she watches Sandra Tackett squirm in her kimono.
“Oh my,” Sandra says. “Would you children like to return tomorrow afternoon for tea and cookies? Tomorrow would be so much better for me. Yes, it would.”
“Sure,” Oliver and Nanette say in unison.
“Very well, then. Four o’clock?” Sandra Tackett says.
“We’ll be here,” says Oliver.
“Tell Booker hi,” Nanette says, “and that Nanette O’Hare misses him a lot.”
Sandra nods once before she shuts the door.
As Nanette and Oliver pedal through the slush and snow, Oliver says, “I think I just figured out what the beast with two backs is. If I’m right, I really don’t want to think about Booker and Sandra making it.”
“You’re right,” Nanette says.
They have to stop pedaling and put both feet on the ground because neither of them can stop laughing.
“I wish Alex could have been there,” Oliver says.
“He could have been,” Nanette says coldly. “He chose not to be.”
Oliver stops laughing and says, “So you’re breaking up with him?”
“How can you break up with someone who is no longer in your life? He abandoned us.”
They pedal on, and when they climb through Oliver’s bedroom window, his mother is there waiting.
“I was worried! You could have left a note, you know,” she says to Oliver. To Nanette, she says, “Didn’t think we were going to see you again. Have you heard from Alex?”
“No,” Nanette says. “Maybe he’s not such a saint after all.”
“He got those boys to stop picking on Oliver.”
Nanette pedals home, plays Scrabble with her parents, ghost-floats through another school day, pedals to Oliver’s. They both ride bikes much easier through the newly plowed streets, and then they wait for Nanette’s iPhone to read 3:59, at which point they knock on Sandra’s door.
“Hello!” she says, fully dressed and much too enthusiastically. “Come in!”
Nanette and Oliver follow Sandra inside through a living room with a grandfather clock and couches and a glass coffee table and into what looks like a greenhouse but is really a kitchen, the walls of which are made entirely of windows. The red-orange light from the setting sun pours in from all angles. Nanette and Oliver sit down at the breakfast bar, and Sandra serves them orange tea with cream and lemon-drop cookies. Nanette is reminded of eating cookies with Mr. Graves, which makes her nostalgic and temporarily melancholy.