"Lily?" Karen said. "Are you there?"

"Yes," I said, my voice breaking. I cleared my throat.

"So, what will you do?" Karen asked, knowing I'd soon be homeless.

"I'm going to England."

"You don't have a job, how can you afford England?"

"England is a job," I said. "I'll get paid." I pulled a bottle of Chardonnay from the fridge, kicking the door shut. Vera had never mentioned pay. "How did Dad tell you?" I asked.

"I don't remember and it's not important," Karen said, unwilling to feed the old dysfunction.

"But did he use the word love?" I asked, recognizing early stages of fresh turmoil like a black wind howling inside me.

Karen sighed. "Don't make me say these things to you. I'm not the bad guy, Lily."

"But I just want to know what happened to my father. I don't know this man who's taken over his body." Where was the father who held me up on ice skates, who loved me enough to punish my white lies and celebrate my report card? "What did he say?"

Karen sighed. "He told me Sue had been cleaning out the garage to make room for her stuff. It went from there."

I found a glass and slammed the cupboard. "It makes no sense. How could he care about someone so different from Mom? I can't even stand to look at her, those eyebrows tweezed to death and hair teased like a rat's nest. She is so opposite of everything Mom was. I can't stand by and watch him do this to our mother," I said. "Can you?"

"He's an adult." Karen paused. "You know, this really isn't a good time for you to be making big changes. Is there someone at church you could talk to?"

"No," I said, pouring wine, spilling on the counter. "I know what I have to do." The important thing was to get off the phone, hide my car keys from myself, and focus my energy on figuring out how to get to England. There, I could start over without all this mess. My mother would want me to go, her well-known desire to travel unfulfilled because Dad objected; he traveled too much for work. "See the world," Mom had said, offering me A Passage to India when I was twelve, teaching me to escape the confines of my life through literature. "I've got to go," I told Karen. I hung up, gripped by new fear of the many potential obstacles, financial and otherwise, between me and Mansfield Park.

I had to see Vera.

Two

The next morning, I crossed the river and drove toward Oak Cliff. My mission: to accept Vera's invitation to her literary festival. Once I decided to go to England, my recent failures stopped looking so bad. In fact, they began to seem like necessary groundwork for a possible turning point in my life. If I hadn't failed, I'd still be failing.

Posters crowded the bookstore window: "Breastfeeding Mothers Welcome Here," "Winter Solstice Ceremony at White Rock Lake," and "Holotropic Breathing Workshops." Tangled in a roaming philodendron, a hand-lettered sign reached out to me: "Dallas Office of Literature Live." An Oriental brass bell announced my arrival as the breeze from the open door blew stacks of free newspapers, their pages fluttering against the red bricks placed to ground them. Colorful fliers advertising yoga teachers or seeking lost exotic pigs hawked phone numbers on tear-off tags. A portly cat patrolled the entryway and I thought of Aunt Norris.

"Is Vera here?" I asked. A fragrant candle burning near the register encouraged my hope as the cashier, my gateway to England, processed the question. I tried not to stare at her pierced face: her eyebrows, a nostril, and the corner of her mouth. I could barely think, wondering about her tongue. Her name tag said Chutney; surely her mother had not named her Chutney. The woman shrugged and I feared I'd missed Vera; she'd already left for England. But Chutney nodded toward the back. I hurried through stacks rising on either side of me like narrow canyons, the atmosphere cooler and quieter among the shelves. I grew excited by the musty paper smell and the promise of a different kind of future. I'd always wanted to live in a novel, a living cosmos bound by cloth covers, awaiting a reader's attention to launch its narrative. Attending a literary festival seemed very close to my dream of living in a book.

I sensed a gothic villain on my trail and quickened my pace, passing Tolstoy, Wharton, and Zola. Frida Kahlo's eyebrow glared at me from a poster on the end of the next stack. At the turn, I collided with Rochester's mad wife, a small Asian woman reading while she walked, scaring us both. Shouldn't they post that warning from the surgeon general in here?

Stepping into the office doorway, my heart still pounding, I found Vera at her desk, surrounded by books. She peered at me over her reading glasses, reminding me of the silver-haired bookmobile lady from my elementary school who placed her hands on my shoulders almost twenty years ago, gently turning my body away from the childish picture books to behold the novels. "I think you're ready for these," the bookmobile lady had said. A mighty chorus filled the air and an intense beam illuminated dust motes as I reached for my first chapter book.

"You all right, Lily?" Vera asked, her finger resting on the last word she'd read, her voice so soft and inviting I wanted to sit next to her and read whatever page she was on. Last time we talked, she'd said we were kindred spirits, swallowing mid-sentence, confessing to the same dream of living in a novel. I'd asked if participating in her husband's literary festival was like living in a novel and she said it depended on one's approach.

I cleared my throat and spoke. "I accept your invitation to the literary festival." When Vera first invited me to the lit fest, the books in her office listened politely, knowing I couldn't afford the flight. Now that I wanted to go, books stacked on the floor and covering every horizontal surface held their musty breath awaiting her response. Vera lifted her glasses to the top of her head where they rested on her gray Georgia O'Keeffe braid.

"You accept what?" She marked her page and gently closed her book.

Why did she ask? We'd talked about this.

She pointed to a chair. "Please sit."

Her reaction surprised me; Vera pretending not to understand, as if we'd never discussed me going to England. Navigating piles of books, I walked around her desk and lifted a box of paperbacks from the old dinette chair. Had I read too much into her invitation? Suddenly, the reasons they wouldn't take me multiplied: I had no passport, I spoke no foreign languages, and my literary skills were limited to turning pages. "You gave me the postcard for Literature Live. You said I was ready for it."

Vera shrugged. She smiled at her desk and willed the phone to ring; a woman in the act of backpedaling. Had she used the same line on everyone in the store that day? "Are you planning to be in England this summer?" she asked.

I wasn't imagining things. Vera had said I was ready. She said I should go to England and leave my problems in Texas. Staring directly at her, I picked a ragged cuticle on my thumb, resisting the urge to bite. Perhaps projects excited her as long as they remained in the abstract. Practical considerations, like what I would do and who would pay, killed her buzz.

"For some reason I thought you were planning to travel," she said.

"I'm planning to change careers," I said. "And when we talked about your husband's literary festival, we were talking about me needing a job." I leaned forward. "Can't I audition," I asked, pressing my hands together, "for a small part?"

"Audition? I wasn't aware you were an actress," Vera said.

I ticked off high school musicals on my fingers: The Music Man, Camelot, and Fiddler on the Roof. Nothing in college. "And I volunteered with Dallas Community Theatre." I passed out programs when I first moved to Dallas, before I had friends. The sorry smile on Vera's face stopped me from launching into my living-your-literature-like-living-your-faith philosophy. "What?" I asked.

"Auditions were held months ago." Vera frowned.

I held my thumb. "What about a nonspeaking part?"

"You don't understand." Vera shook her head and then revealed the major obstacle lurking beyond the range of my hope. "Visitors don't do the acting," she said. "Visitors watch productions and attend lectures."

I bit my cuticle and blood gushed.

"The festival hires professional actors who perform for the paying public." She tapped her pen on a pink message pad. "But, you know," she mused, pointing her pen at me, "I like your idea. Firing the salaried actors and replacing them with the paying public is an interesting approach." Vera pushed her chair back and offered me a tissue for my thumb. "Let's fire the actors. I wonder how that would work."

I wrapped my thumb in the tissue. "I don't think you would fire all of them," I said, accepting credit for the business concept she'd converted from my misunderstanding. "You'd keep a couple of professionals to coach the amateurs."

Vera's eyes grew wide. "We'd save money."

We stared at each other, not blinking.

"So, can I go?"

"I'm thinking." Vera put the pen down. Something about firing the actors had changed the dynamics and she began to seem like her old self.

"Do you have any other jobs?" I asked.

"Like what?"

"I have a business degree. I could help you in an administrative capacity."

"We have Claire for that." Vera bit her pen.

"I can take tickets."

"You'd have to fight the volunteers for that job." Eventually, she folded her arms and spoke slowly. "We do have one sticky situation you might help with. Let me call my husband and see where he is with that. Hold on." Vera picked up her phone and dialed England, home of her husband, executive director of the lit fest. "Let's fire all the actors," she mused, punching numbers twice before getting an answer. "Nigel dear, any word from Her Ladyship?" Vera swept a few stray hairs off her forehead and I realized what a big adventure this would be, the very word Ladyship opening portals of newness for me.