69. French bearing gifts

Lenore wasn’t too pleased me being forty-five minutes late to my own book signing. A lot of people left before I got there. Burbank stood outside another fifteen minutes because he didn’t want anyone to guess his identity. By the time he came in, I had finished my speech and was doing autographs.

The French like to give gifts. I got a collage of things from my book, a t-shirt that says “Beam me up, Angie,” and a portrait someone drew of me. The weirdest gift, though, I was told to open at home. So when I got back to the hotel, I opened the box, which had been wrapped in seven layers of different wrapping papers, to find twelve clothes pins, one of those little packs of grape jelly you get from restaurants, and an empty jar. There was also a page of my first book, carefully ripped out, with twelve seemingly random words highlighted. Burbank thinks it’s some kind of code. I didn’t open the jar for fear of some poisonous gas leaking out.