Présentation de l'éditeur
Heralding the arrival of a stunning new voice in American fiction, Robin Black’s
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This
takes readers into the minds and hearts of people navigating the unsettling transitions that life presents to us all.
Written with maturity and insight, and in beautiful, clear-eyed prose, these stories plumb the depths of love, loss, and hope. A father struggles to forge an independent identity as his blind daughter prepares for college. A mother comes to terms with her adult daughter’s infidelity, even as she keeps a disturbing secret of her own. An artist mourns the end of a romance while painting a dying man’s portrait. An accident on a trip to Italy and an unexpected connection with a stranger cause a woman to question her lifelong assumptions about herself.
Brilliant, hopeful, and fearlessly honest,
If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This illuminates the truths of human relationships, truths we come to recognize in these characters and in ourselves.
Extrait
Chapter One
The Guide
At seventeen, Jack Snyder’s daughter is slender- faced and long of limb and still able to startle her father with her seeming certainty about everything she thinks. They’re driving along roads he doesn’t yet know, on their way to meet her first seeing-eye dog, and she is wearing polka-dotted sunglasses, a long jean skirt, and a shirt with the words: “If you can read this T-shirt, maybe YOU can tell ME what it says.” A kid from her school ordered them, in the dozens, and Lila bought three in different shades. “You’re sure they aren’t identical?” she questioned her mother at the time. “I don’t want my teachers thinking I never change my clothes.”
“Believe me, Lila,” Ann Snyder said. “I don’t want your teachers thinking you never change your clothes either.”
As Jack scans the road for signs, Lila is proclaiming to him in those certain tones of hers that if it weren’t for being quite so blind and having to have one, she’d definitely never get a dog. Never. Never ever. And her father is trying to follow her, trying to respond appropriately; but thoughts of Miranda Hamilton compete with the girl’s words. Miranda Hamilton unbuttoning her jeans the night before, sliding them down her thighs, stepping panty-clad from the denim pooled at her feet. Miranda Hamilton unbuttoning his suit pants, leaving them bound around his legs until he kicked them off. Miranda’s cropped blond hair fading into soft, colorless down along the back of her neck. Miranda laughing as she filled her mouth with bourbon from Jack’s glass and held the fluid there, smiling while it drizzled from her lips until he kissed her and swallowed it himself. Miranda whispering to Jack, her mouth still whiskey damp, just to lie back, lie still, while she moved her hips in something close to perfect circles over him. Just lie still. Just lie still. Just lie still.
“Really, Dad, they’re so obsequious,” Lila says, and Jack has to remind himself what they’re talking about. Guide dogs. They’re talking about guide dogs. “The whole alpha-male pack-mentality thing. Cats don’t give a shit about anyone, right?” Her father swerves around a pothole, and senses her sway beside him, unprepared. It’s an early- spring day and they are into the long weeks between the damage done by ice and snow and the repair work to come.
“That’s certainly their reputation,” Jack says. “Cats are undomesticatable. Too wild.”
“I find that infinitely more appealing.”
Jack nods silently, an assent he knows his daughter cannot see.
“Maybe I could have the first ever seeing-eye cat.” Lila crosses her arms. “Some real haughty feline with attitude.”
“You mean like you?”
But his daughter shakes her head. “No.” She turns her face toward the breeze of the open window, lifting her sunglasses. “No,” she repeats. “I’d want a guide cat who really doesn’t give a flying fuck.” She draws an audible breath through her nose. “Manure?”
“We’re in farm country now.” He says it quietly, as
