Life Sentences by Laura Lippman

and Annie had been in the same room. (A midyear graduate from college, she hadn’t bothered to walk, just packed up her things and gone straight to a sublet on the Lower East Side, back when the Lower East Side was still the Lower East Side.)
    She had been nervous that night, reading in front of her parents. And Annie. The section she had earmarked for bookstore appearances suddenly seemed inappropriate, centering as it did on her attempt to re-create the moment her father met Annie. Her parents had raised her to be direct and down-to-earth about sex, but did that apply to their own sex lives? Her mother had explained the biology of the matter to her when she was eight, while her father had spent his life instructing her in the more indefinable nature of desire. She had been six or seven when her father had pointed out a woman near the Konstant Kandy stand in Lexington Market. “That woman,” he said, gesturing with the spoon from his ice cream, “has a magnificent ass. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth compared such an ass to a peach, or maybe it was a nectarine, but that’s a little flat-footed for me. What do you think? A cello, perhaps, or an amaryllis bulb, with the backbone stretching up like the stem, the head the flower?” No, the timing was off, for Roth’s book certainly wasn’t around when she was six. In fact, she remembered seeing its yellow cover on her father’s nightstand, in the apartment he shared with Annie, and thinking, He says he’s too strapped to get me new shoes, yet he buys himself hardcover books. But her father considered books as essential as food. He would have been baffled if anyone suggested not buying the book he wanted the moment he wanted it. Besides, her father’s library was a gold mine for a dirty-minded girl. Cassandra had read Roth and Updike and Mailer. She read Candy, although she didn’t understand it until she read Voltaire in a college lit class. Her father’s contemporary books, much more than his library of classics, prepared her well for the world she entered. The books didn’t stop her from having a stupid affair with one of her college professors, but they armed her with the information that the professor didn’t have as much power as a young woman might assume.
    For all of Cassandra’s hard-earned literary sophistication, she could not read the passage about her father and Annie in front of them. Or, for God’s sake, her mother and her friend, starchy Lillian. She read from the prologue instead, but she wasn’t prepared, and she tripped over words as if she had never seen them before. Later, her father and Annie took her to Tio Pepe’s—had they won or lost the coin toss? Cassandra wondered wryly—and her father tried to suggest that Lillian was a repressed lesbian who had been in love with Lennie for years, but even Annie found that ridiculous. “Oh, Ric,” she said with a fluttering sigh, and he looked at her as if he could not believe she was his.
    How sweet it had been, three years later, to return to Baltimore and speak in an auditorium at the Pratt library, the room brimming with people who had discovered the book in paperback. Women from reading clubs, in the main, but also some much younger girls, those who hadtheir own problematic fathers, and even a few older men, the type who had studied her author photo a little too closely and thought they might help her with her daddy issues, whether they admitted that to themselves or not.
    She wondered now if her father, despite all his years in classrooms, had a touch of stage fright.
    â€œYou’re not nervous, are you?”
    â€œWhen have I ever been nervous to face an audience?” he shot back. “Besides, you do all the work, right? You’re going to ask the questions, and I’m going to answer.”
    â€œWell, they bill it as a conversation. It wouldn’t be wrong if you had a few questions for