First there would have to be a suitable reply and Chellis wanted nothing left to chance.
“You’re coming with me,” she announced as she knocked on the door to Flavian’s room.
He emerged looking as though the batteries behind his eyes were only half charged.
“Comb your hair,” she instructed.
They walked the half mile to downtown Moscow more briskly than Flavian would have liked, but this, he figured out, was part of Chellis’s force of personality shield. In a town with thousands of college age men who, studies showed, spent far too much of their time thinking about sex, she wanted her pace to communicate a sense of purpose rather a sense of, good morning, I’m available for questions and open to be flirted with. Certainly her big sunglasses and the way she’d stowed her hair under the Chicago Cubs baseball cap accessorized that purpose. Flavian took note of how well it worked. It was as though she was clearing a path through the brush for both of them.
Her destination, the Paper Heron, was wedged between a bike shop and a drug store. She told Flavian she was going to grab a few things from the drug store, but to meet her in fifteen minutes back on the street. When he was done he found her sitting on the ledge of the big planter box, her back to the sunshine, reading a book.
“Let’s see what you got,” she said.
She looked at the card and noticed, without even bothering to read it, that it featured a longhorn steer standing at a fence post in conversation with a standing pig, reading a newspaper and wearing a beret.
That was enough.
Chellis slid her sunglasses down her nose a bit and looked him dead in the eyes.
“Flavian. There’s just no way we’re going to be using livestock as part of our communications plan. No way. Now get back in there and get us something we can use.”
“All right, all right, all right,” he said. “It was just a little joke.”
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