Lydia looked at Nina and her mouth twitched. “That’s creepy.”
Nina shrugged. “People make book references. What can you do?”
Lydia continued reading:
By the way, you and Nina would probably really get along. You should have dinner or something. I’ve put a gift card for AOC in the envelope. Hopefully, it’s still in business and you two can start to be friends.
Lydia looked up at Nina and frowned. “Such a manipulative bastard, even dead. It’s funny how people behave badly their whole lives and then think they can say sorry and it’s all erased. Not that AOC isn’t a great restaurant.” Euclid left Nina and wandered over to jump on Lydia’s lap. “He left my mom and her sister when they were really young, and my mom was kind of ruined by it. My grandma is a total witch—did you catch that?”
Nina nodded. “It was subtle, but yeah, I noticed.”
“She made my mom’s life difficult, and my mom made my life difficult, and now I make other people’s lives difficult, and maybe it’s time the whole cycle stopped.” She sighed. “I just find people so . . .”
“Scary?” asked Nina, sympathetically.
Lydia looked at Nina for a long time. “No,” she said. “Deeply irritating and fun to torment.”
“Oh,” said Nina.
Suddenly, Lydia tore the letter from William into a dozen tiny pieces and threw them in the air. “So much for Grandpa.” She grinned. “Fancy a cup of tea?”
At the back of Lydia’s house was a wide, curving garden. Sitting there, sipping an excellent cup of tea, Nina smiled cautiously. “What do you do for work?” She waved inside at all the books. “Are you a teacher or something?”
Lydia shook her head. “No, I work at the RAND Corporation. Do you know it?”
Nina nodded. “Originally started by the Douglas Aircraft Company to research new weapons, it is an international think tank that has produced over thirty Nobel Prize winners.” She paused. “RAND is actually short for research and development.” She paused again, and hesitated. “I’m actually a little bit obsessed with RAND, because they do all this secret stuff and probably have a room with one of those big maps on the floor with lights and tiny models.”
Lydia laughed again. “I can take you there, if you like.”
“Really? There’s a room with a map and tiny little models?”
“No, but there’s a reasonable cafeteria.”
Euclid walked to the middle of the lawn and sprawled, making sure everyone could admire him.
Nina asked, “What do you do at RAND?”
“Oh, it’s thrilling,” said Lydia. “I research global traffic patterns.”
“Wow,” said Nina. “That really is incredibly boring.”
Lydia laughed. “Not to me, which is why I do it. I don’t see cars; I see patterns. And it’s not even only cars; it’s how people move around in general.” She sipped her tea and reached for a cookie. “I love it. Do you love your work?”
Nina thought about it. “Yes, I guess I do. I sort of fell into it, rather than chose it, but it suits me very well. I live a very quiet life, I walk to work, I read a lot, I have a trivia team, and I have a cat.” She turned up her hands. “It’s all pretty good.”
“No boyfriend? Or girlfriend?”
Nina shook her head. “No. There was someone but I messed it up.”
“How?”
Nina took a deep breath. “I get anxiety,” she said.
“Like Archie?” asked Lydia.
Nina nodded. “I broke up with him before we’d even really started. I got overwhelmed and threw him out of the boat.” Suddenly, her eyes were prickling. “It’s so stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. Anxiety is the most common mental illness in America, with over forty million sufferers.”
Nina stared at her.
Lydia shrugged. “I share an office with a mental health researcher. RAND is actually full of people like us, nerdy obsessives with good memories.” She took another cookie and started eating it. “But why don’t you explain to him and see if you can start it up again? Do you want to?”
Nina nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know. I really like him, and being with him actually feels good, but there’s too much going on. I thought I was pretty much alone, and I was OK with it. Good with it, even. Now I have all of you guys to deal with, and a boyfriend was too much.”
Lydia gazed at her. “You’re an idiot. We’re family; you can ignore us completely. We’re like succulents: Minor occasional attention is entirely sufficient. You should absolutely get him back.”
“He’s ignoring my texts.”
“Have you considered the old-fashioned, in-person conversation?” Lydia put down her teacup.
“No,” said Nina. “Besides, he’s competing in a trivia competition this evening; the final of the Southern California Quiz Bowl. I don’t want to put him off.”
“Wow,” said Lydia. “That is both the lamest and the nerdiest excuse for inaction I’ve ever heard. I can’t decide whether to smack you across the face or burst into applause.”
Nina opened her mouth to respond, when her phone rang.
“Can you come right away?” It was Liz, and she sounded frazzled. In the background, Nina could hear yelling.
“What’s going on?”
“Well, Meffo came by and posted a notice that the store was closing and was going to be replaced by a pot-infused makeup emporium called Puff and Pout.”
“You’re joking. A pot dispensary?”
“No. Artisanal makeup, custom made for each customer from a range of natural minerals and pigments, infused with CBD oil and locally sourced organic marijuana.”
“Did you memorize that?”
“No, I’m reading from the notice. Their slogan is Look fantastic, feel even better.”
“Wow.”
“Then people started reading the notice, and all of a sudden there was a crowd outside with placards, and now the police are here and it’s all gotten a bit out of hand.”
There was the sound of breaking glass.
“Oh dear. Gotta go.”
“Was that our window?” Nina had visions of crowds of zombies swarming the store, which didn’t make any sense, but that’s what popped into her head.
“No, Meffo’s windshield. I stashed him in the office for safety, but there wasn’t much I could do about his car.” Then she hung up.
Nina turned to Lydia. “How fast do you think we can get to Larchmont Boulevard?”
Lydia grinned. “In K.I.T.T.? With me driving? Twenty minutes.”
Nina shook her head. “No, in a regular Trans Am, because K.I.T.T. is a fictional character, during rush hour, and with me driving.”
Lydia made a face. “Forty minutes.”
“Fine, you drive.”
Twenty-eight
In which things get a little out of hand.
Here’s a useful tip: Driving through Los Angeles in a fast car with a genius researcher is not enjoyable, unless you are one of those people who drinks five Red Bulls and snorts coke before getting in the front seat of a roller coaster and sticking both arms in the air. Nina started reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as they sped through Beverly Hills, and by the time they reached Larchmont, she was reading the line about rolling the bottoms of trousers, and that tells you how fast they were going. Furthermore, apparently the way to beat traffic in LA is to treat straight lines as abominations and Tetris your way through the side streets. It didn’t help that Lydia was calling out street names as she went, like a pool shark calling a pocket.